Futures Past

by James White

  Now he was the only human being not on Earth. That proved, he thought cynically, just how wrong they were.

  "Mitch," said the voice in his earphones suddenly. "We're about ready to go. Get your cameras rolling, Mitch. Chemical and simple atomic weapons first. Watch northeast Asia for the fireworks display." The voice paused. Mitchell had the big telescopic cameras already turning when it continued. "You can start saying your piece now, Mitch. But don't be too smart. Don't make too many cracks. This may not turn out...well, the way we want it."

  No, said Mitchell silently. I won't be smart or make cracks. Not this time. This might be my first funeral oration. The death of a world is a serious business.

  The star-begotten trio began edging closer, thinking great, sad, reproachful thoughts. Mitchell ignored them. In the air-less silence little, multicolored lights told of recording equipment ready and waiting. He cleared his throat and began to speak.

  "This is Gregory Mitchell, on the Moon," he said quietly. "From here the Earth is a big, intensely blue crescent hanging in blackness above the jagged ringwall of the crater Petavius. It is blue because, as yet, the atmosphere is unpoisoned by the fission products of A-bombs, B-bombs, or H-bombs. But in a few moments ..."

  Mitchell went on talking. Quietly, soberly, he set the scene. Earth as seen by a detached observer, from space. No cracks; no side remarks. Just plain, unemotional reporting. Trouble was he didn't feel detached at all; and a lot of emotions he hadn't known he possessed were beginning to affect his annunciation. Mitchell, for the first time in his life, felt very, very lonely.

  That was understandable, of course. He was the only human being off Earth.

  The tiny colony on Mars had tidied away their equipment, sealed their domes, and left. The staff of the Lunar Observatory had given their Big Glass a farewell polish, and departed. With them went the men of the refineries at Tycho, Eratosthenes, and Hell, and the scientists at the fuel abstraction plant in the Mare Imbrium. And the two exploratory ships nosing their way among the moons of Jupiter and Saturn had gone back, too. Everybody had gone back. They had just left whatever they had been doing and gone home. Home to Earth. Home for the Fireworks, the Big Show.

  They all thought it very important to be in on the finale.

  They couldn't make any difference to the final outcome, Mitchell knew. It was stupid, suicidal; but it was also the right thing to do. At the most important moment in human history they had all come home. Propaganda hadn't been responsible—they were too intelligent to be affected by that even if it had been used. They had come back to die, if that should be necessary, on their home planet, for an ideal and a way of living that they at long last knew to be worth dying for—and not worth living without.

  Mitchell almost wished that he was up there, too.

  On Earth's night side a point of light winked briefly into being and remained as an angry red blotch. The dump at Reinomsk, in the Urals. Talking rapidly, describing everything he saw, Mitchell lined up a telescope with the conflagration that marked the point of the explosion and saw that the monstrous, poisoned mushroom was already spreading and being torn to pieces by stratospheric winds. As he talked there were more winking lights, more angry red fever spots.

  Farther south, in Tunisia, another point of pale green light appeared suddenly and died in a fading red stain of airborn radioactives. Almost simultaneously the Aleutians and Central Australia followed suit. Mitchell wondered what the American continent looked like now. But it was out of sight on the day side of the planet—and anyway, probably most of the spectacular stuff would be happening in the Eastern hemisphere. It was going to be quite a show.

  Mitchell wondered what the three aliens thought of the performance. They were a very critical audience, he knew, and they hadn't liked it very much up to now. But the show could be saved by a terrific climax, a grand finale. And it could be a smash hit if only the actors lived to take a curtain call.

  It was hard to think of it turning out a flop; there was so much action, drama, and sheer talent in it. Maybe there had been too much action recently—too much melodrama, and too much blood and atomic thunder. But there were good things in it, too. With people like Shakespeare, Gandhi, and Lister collaborating on the Book, with decor by Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Wren, and musical arrangements by Beethoven, Gershwin and Sibelius among others, it could not help but be good.

  But the trouble was that there was no producer, and by the time enough of the cast became intelligent enough to realize just how the show was supposed to go, it was too late to try producing themselves.

  Or almost too late.

  Mitchell caught himself sharply; without realizing it he'd been holding forth onto the tape like some cosmic theater critic. He shut up and began moving among his equipment, switching on receivers and moving their dials almost at random. As well as his own commentary, he wanted to record some radio reports from different countries on the Earth. He tried not to let the reports affect him, but it was no good.

  When one of them said, ". . . the last load of Beebees is now at the X point, after their arrival from Dakar, where they were landed from the cruiser Unicorn which carried them from the Arctic base in North Canada, Each vial is encased in shock-absorbent layers of cotton and foam rubber, and during the final stages of the journey, in case of accidents, ten men with flame-throwers guarded each tiny container, ready to burn it and themselves out of existence. . . ." Mitchell felt the cold sweat break out on his forehead and his whole body crawl with a sympathetic itch. Viciously he slapped the toggle on his shoulder, switching the suit's phones out of circuit with that particular receiver.

  Ten guards with flame-throwers, he thought disgustedly. Flame-throwers! And that was supposed to be protection against the most hellishly efficient engine of mass destruction ever developed—the Mark 17 Bacteriological Bomb.

  They'd had flame-throwers at that base in the Arctic Circle which was producing BB17, but that hadn't stopped them from being wiped out to a man when a faulty retort sprung a leak. BB17 was fast-acting, and fantastically heat-resistant, but, being an artificial strain, it died out eventually if it hadn't anything to feed on and was kept isolated. After a few years had elapsed, Mitchell remembered, they had been able to clean out that sealed-up base and use it again—to restart production of BB17.

  But BB17 hadn't been the only Weapon Too Terrible To Be Used that had been developed. The number of conventional A-bombs possessed by even the poorest countries came as a great shock to everyone. Russia, too. And Great Britain, who always seemed to prefer their native craftsmanship to mass production, had a few little bombs using a new type of reaction which produced an area of total destruction approximately seventy miles wide. France had come up with some lovely nerve gases, and Egypt had the neo-influenza bugs. None of these weapons was for use, of course; they were all too horrible, too deadly.

  But they'd kept on making them anyway. They'd made them until each and every country had enough Beebees to wipe out all life on Earth.

  Mitchell laughed softly, then cursed. He looked at the equipment which might soon contain the records of the last words and deeds of a world that had died by its own hand. It was insane, crazy. But it was also wonderful, soul-stirring, and utterly human.

  Mitchell wanted to talk again. He had to get this off his chest or he would blow himself apart. He took a deep breath.

  The things on the crater floor edged nearer. Their awful alien minds touched his. The thing from Sirius that looked like a withered prune radiated a deep wave of pity and helplessness. The lizard-thing from Canopus and the thing in the cube from he didn't know where sent thoughts of sadness and recrimination, reproaching him that his young and promising race had blindly allowed itself to get into such a tragic predicament.

  Mitchell ignored them. At first when he'd realized that these things were from the stars, he'd thought that they could have helped—produced a miracle of superscience maybe, and save the world. But no, they had explained that they had come in small
scoutships and that they had no miracles on them, or thoughts to that effect. And even if they could have helped, they wouldn't. It was the Law, they had told him, that each race still bound to one solar system had to solve its problem without outside help. The Earth people would have to work this thing out for themselves.

  Mitchell ground his teeth helplessly at the memory of it. Then he began to talk.

  It wasn't quiet, unemotional reporting this time, but the almost incoherent eruption of a man complaining bitterly against blind fate, and at the even blinder recent stupidity of his fellow men. Sometimes he spoke angrily and at the top of his voice, sometimes in a whisper that was almost a sob. He started with the small, international fights and worked up to World Wars One and Two and beyond. He accused, he reviled, and he condemned by name the men of the past he thought had contributed to the present mess by word, deed or omission. His tirade included monarchs, dictators, presidents, and the unknown millions of bottle washers and street sweepers who had allowed themselves to be led like sheep, and who hadn't used their brains to think with. He cursed the stupidity that started the Cold War and made every nation an arsenal where eventually the greatest fear had grown to be that of its own weapons getting out of control.

  Something irritated Mitchell's ear. He disregarded it. Almost shouting, he went on, ". . . nobody ever wanted a war—nobody who actually had to fight in it, that is. The Toms, Dicks, and Harrys who clean windows or drive trucks or dig potatoes never wanted wars. Neither did the Ivans or the Achmeds or the Mitsuis. And now, when we've at last come to our senses, when we've all agreed that war must stop, we're still threatened with destruction—"

  Mitchell broke off as the irritation in his ear returned. In the silence it resolved itself into a voice in his phones.

  "Mitch! Ten seconds to go!"

  Mitchell looked up at the big blue crescent Earth, then at the little watch fixed inside his helmet, then back again. Funny, he thought, the Earth and the watch looked to be the same size. All at once the awful realization of what was about to happen, and of what might happen afterward, descended on him with crushing, implacable force.

  "Oh God," he prayed, "make this turn out... right."

  On the darkened eastern hemisphere a point of searing blue light—many times brighter than any that had gone before—flared suddenly. Within a second it grew to a blinding disc a hundred miles across that lit the whole of North Africa like a planet-sized floodlight. Then orange and purple and dirty brown clouds formed, hiding its centre and making it look like a giant, hazy-edged doughnut.

  The fiery doughnut continued to expand, but it began to fade. The reaction wasn't self-sustaining after all.

  Mitchell stumbled to a telescope, but he couldn't see a thing—his visor kept fogging up just at eye level. Vaguely he saw the lizard and the withered prune-thing scuttling and bouncing away in the direction of their ships; the cube, who had been wearing his, was gone already. The ending of the show had more than pleased them—their parting thoughts to him brought a tightness to his throat and made it even harder for him to see. Mitchell left the useless telescope and went to one of the receivers. Tears didn't affect one's hearing, luckily.

  It was a shouting, screaming bedlam.

  "Change in wind direction," roared one. "Dust warning for Malta and Italy as far north as Rome. Population will go underground for eighteen hours minimum. Take food and water, especially water...."

  "Prenez-garde Marseilles et Lyon . . ." babbled another. "Achtung! Achtung! . . ." screamed somebody else. But at most of the stations they were just yelling their fool heads off.

  Mitchell searched the dial feverishly until he got what he wanted.

  ". .. we are flying eight miles above the northwest coast of Africa, and can see the main cloud like a dull red fog drifting toward us from over the Sahara. Wind velocities, etc., have been calculated so that the main cloud will disperse harmlessly over the north Atlantic, but some of the ragged edges have become detached and are being blown toward Central Europe. Cities in the danger area are being warned to get the people into the shelters prepared for this contingency."

  Happily; the voice continued; "The shock wave from the explosion point reached harmless proportions beyond a circle of 150 miles radius. There were no casualties, and there is now no danger of the multiple H-explosion starting a self-sustaining chain reaction in the Earth's crust.

  "Operation Last Blast has been a complete success. Everything—chemical explosives, orthodox atomic weapons, the works—went up at once. Sick of war at last, the people of the Earth unanimously decided to disarm, so today we destroyed all our weapons of war, everywhere, and at almost the same time. There is not a bomb or gun left on the whole planet.

  "The chemical explosives and simple A-weapons were disposed of harmlessly in specially evacuated areas of the countries concerned. But the Sahara blast was a different matter. As you know, the only way we could be sure of destroying our fantastically heat-resistant and utterly deadly bacteriological bombs—the BB17's—was to collect them all in one place and detonate a circle of H-bombs around them; no bacteria could live through the heat produced by that explosion. But setting off so many H-weapons all together was a terrible risk. There was a chance that the explosion would start a chain reaction in the Earth's crust that would blow the planet into very small pieces. We were lucky; it didn't.

  "Now the people who came home from the Moon and planets to be present at the greatest and most dangerous moment in human history, the people who were unable to take our bombs into space because of the shock of takeoff, can go out again. They can go out with a new-found maturity and a sense of complete unity and conquer those planets. Eventually they will spread to the stars. We are a fighting race, but we no longer are a warlike one. There are plenty of natural forces in the universe to fight; we've now outgrown the urge to fight ourselves, or for that matter, any other intelligent and civilized species we might find out there among the stars.

  "This is Bryce Paterson signing off and returning you to the studio...."

  At the studio: sounds of shouting, cheering, laughing. A voice calling, "Shaddup dammit, we're on the air," and another asking, "But if we aren't going to make gunpowder anymore, what about the Fifth of November ... ?"

  Mitchell began slowly storing away his record tapes and film spools. He wondered how long it would be before somebody down there remembered that he was up here.

  BOARDING PARTY

  THE blast ripped away the mouth of number six launching tube, together with a wide area of the ship's hull plating. Part of an underlying longeron torn free by the explosion —a twisted and ragged-edged I-beam fully twelve feet long—was blown downward into the wrecked tube. Narrowly missing an already primed warhead, and without noticeably slowing speed, it battered its way through the fusing servos and crashed into the control chamber. Like a gargantuan javelin it shot unerringly toward the nerve center of the room, an erect, metal ovoid that was the focus of a hundred brightly-colored cables. The control pod's protective screen checked the hurtling girder abruptly, but could not stop it until the damage had been done.

  As the twisted mass of metal was flung heavily away by the twenty gravities repulsion of the screen, a thick, oily, shock-absorbent fluid bubbled from the wound it had made in the pod's side. That, and a little blood.

  Captain Cross said, "Grayson."

  What, Grayson thought tiredly, do you want me to do about it? Aloud, he said, "Yes, sir. I see it."

  The destruction of number six, and the damage to the human-operated control pod showing on the captain's master screen was duplicated on his own panel, and as ship's medical officer he knew his duty. Send a nurse either to patch up or transfer the casualty to sick bay; simple. But the simple answer to this problem was impossible, Dr. Grayson knew as he looked helplessly at nine tiny, yellow lights burning at widely separate intervals on his control panel; there wasn't a nurse available to send.

  Nine lights, burning yellow to indicate that all were curren
tly engaged on cases, when there should have been eighty!

  There had been eighty just half an hour ago, before the Starcloud met the three Raghman ships, but since then his lights had been steadily going out. Dr. Grayson tried to think of them as lights going out, and not as whole sections of the ship wrecked, cut off from control and communication, or just cut off; it was better for his mental efficiency if he did that. He found it very difficult to accept the fact that this, the invincible, indestructible, and a dozen more similar adjectives, super-battleship Starcloud was ninety percent wreckage, with the percentage increasing every minute. Judging by the stunned expressions on the faces of the three other officers in the control room, they were having the same difficulty.

  No one had ever reported three ships acting together before; usually the Raghman globes operated singly. Grayson was sure that the Starcloud wouldn't live to report it either.

  One of the lights on his panel—Nurse 53—flickered from yellow to white, indicating that the nurse had almost finished with the current case and would shortly be free for reassignment to another. Grayson forced the overall catastrophe out of his mind quickly, and narrowed its focus to concentrate solely on his job. Fifty-three was working fairly close to the wrecked number six, so it might be possible to help the casualty there after all. He bent forward and flipped the switch that would link the nurse's vision pickup with his main view-screen, and watched the treatment being completed.

  The man had suffered fractures in both legs, damage to the lumbar vertebrae, and superficial lacerations on and around the affected areas. He was encased now in a sticky white cocoon from toes to chest, and as Grayson watched carefully, a needle drove into the crewman's arm, injecting antishock and a sedative, and withdrew again too fast for him to see it. A fine spray played briefly over the cast, hardening it, then Nurse 53's light turned green. Treatment concluded.