When The Future Dies

by Nat Schachner

  It was Thoron. His hand shot up to the familiar position, his fine old features twisted in fanatic rage.

  Derek ducked as a blue flame sizzled harmlessly over his head. “You damned fool!” he gritted, and let him have it squarely on the chin. Thoron went down heavily.

  “You asked for it,” Derek panted as he ran on.

  The wall loomed high in front. Behind him were gathering shouts. He shot a hasty glance backward.

  There were men running toward him. Thoron was on his feet again, shaking a trembling fist.

  Derek jumped for the little hollow where he had seen Merle stand. There was a little spurt, a streak of fire, and a round hole appeared in the wall, a little to one side. Another sizzle, and another hole appeared as if by magic. They were raying him. He swore violently, as the slide stubbornly refused to open. The wall had the appearance of a riddled fort by now. A ray scorched the hair on his head; there was a stab of heat at his side. Luckily it was a glancing thrust. But they were getting the range. The next beam would catch him square.

  He shifted his position desperately. “Open sesame!” he shouted, as if the ancient incantation could help. Surprisingly, it did, or maybe it was the shift of his body to the right spot. The slide was open, revealing an oblong of garden.

  There was a great shout behind him as he dived through. But the door had gone noiselessly shut again, and for the moment he was safe.

  He cast about in the vast tree-clouded garden like a bloodhound on the trail. Where was Merle? She had disappeared. He raced through forestlike glades, calling her name, reckless of being overheard by others.

  A thin scream came to him—it was Merle’s voice, lifted in tearing fright and agony. To Derek it seemed to come in the direction of a particularly dense clump. He went crashing through it like a bolt from the blue. Behind there was a sudden swelling of sound. The men of the future had penetrated the wall, were in fierce pursuit. But this did not matter—not now. Derek’s whole being was immersed in that last faint shriek of Merle’s. What was happening to her?

  He broke through at last, into the spacious, fountain-splashed sward where he had first come into this land of the future. There he saw something that made the heated blood boil in his veins.

  The time-traveling machine lay like a monstrous egg on the close-cropped grass. Merle was struggling weakly in the powerful arms of Mike Spinnot. He was dragging her, one hairy hand over her mouth to silence her cries, into the interior of the machine. There was a thick oily grin on his ill-favored face.

  Derek acted swiftly. The distance between them was about a hundred yards. He swung over in a wide circle so as to be behind the struggling pair. Mike was already tugging the girl’s half-conscious body through the entrance to the cage when Derek let out a final burst of speed, throwing over all attempt at concealment. Once they were safely within, it would be too late.

  WITH A final heave, Spinnot thrust the girl bodily into the machine, turned to pull the switch that closed the door. Then for the first time he saw Derek, bearing down upon the cage like a thunderbolt.

  The startled crime king let out a yell and fumbled the switch. He recovered quickly and jammed it down. But that fumbled second had been enough. Derek had dived through, thrust Merle out of the cage onto the soft thick grass, in one swift clean movement. Then the slide shot home—behind him.

  Mike’s hand came up with a quick jerk, but the momentum of Derek’s forward thrust carried him clutching against Spinnot’s legs. Spinnot tottered, sagged against the instrument panel, and crashed heavily upon Derek’s prone body.

  The next instant the machine leaped into roaring, rocking life. Through the already swirling bars, Derek caught a glimpse of a horde of furious faces outside, in the foremost of which he recognized the fanatic gleam of Thoron’s. He was shouting something unintelligible in the high whine the cage was developing. A spatter of blue flashes twisted harmlessly around the circling bars, then a swift blur, and the machine spun dizzily off into time.

  Both men were on their feet almost simultaneously.

  Mike’s face was a mask of hate, his lips drawn back from his teeth in an animal snarl. “Damn you!” he roared. “I’ll cut your heart out for this.”

  He lashed out. Derek ducked and bored in with a rapid one-two to the stomach that brought a grunt of pain from Spinnot. Mike reached out with his long arms and caught the reporter in a fierce bone-crushing hold. Derek squirmed to get loose, but all his squirmings seemed only to tighten the grip. He felt his ribs cracking under the strain of that bearlike hug. Mike’s hot mouth breathed on his face, whistling with the effort.

  Then the machine rocked heavily; there was a thump, as if it had met with some obstruction in its wild careening through time. Both were thrown heavily. Derek broke loose and tottered to his feet.

  Back and forth they fought, bruised, battered, panting, swinging dizzily to the whining motion of the cage. Derek felt himself going. It could not last much longer. Stepping back suddenly, and putting every last ounce of his remaining strength behind the blow, he shot clean for the point of the chin.

  Mike’s eyes went glassy; he swayed drunkenly, and collapsed in a limp sprawling heap. Derek tottered in a daze, then the brutal punishment he had taken claimed his aching body. He, too, went down, sprawling over the motionless crime lord. His last weltering thought was that the machine seemed to be slackening in its tremendous motion.

  DEREK came up for air to find the prison physician bending gravely over him. In the background were figures, familiar ones—the warden, the chaplain, the guards, his brother reporters, just as if the whole adventure had been merely a dream. Yes; and there was Mike Spinnot, masked, black-gowned, enthroned in the death chair, metal cap in place, the slit trousers revealing the bare, shaven leg, the deadly electrodes clamped into position.

  “What happened?” he asked in a weak voice.

  The warden told him. “When you barged into that strange machine, the door closed, and the next instant it was gone, a whirling flash of light. We hardly had time to turn our guns on the disappearing cage when it appeared again, slowing down to a halt. We found you dead to the world on top of Spinnot, and the girl and the old man gone.”

  Derek shook his head dazedly. “But we’ve been gone over a day!” he protested.

  The warden shook his head pityingly. “Not longer than it takes to say Jack Robinson,” he said. “It was the clout on your head as you hit the cage and bowled Mike over that’s giving you ideas.”

  Derek thought of all he had been through and opened his mouth to protest. Then he changed his mind. They would not believe him.

  “Everything ready?” inquired the warden of the impassively waiting guard.

  “Everything, sir.”

  He pulled out his huge old-fashioned watch, snapped open the case.

  “Thirty seconds to go,” he stated calmly, professionally.

  A heavy breathing silence fell suddenly upon the chamber. Mike Spinnot was about to pay the extreme penalty of the law for his crimes.

  Derek lay quietly, his eyes averted from the death chair. Merle Spinney was not born yet, would not be for thousands of years. His eyes turned to the resting ovoid. They lighted up with a strange gleam.

  Then he caught his breath.

  Spinnot—Spinney—Time often changed names more than that—

  Once the current was turned on, Merle Spinney might never be born!

  The End

  *************************

  The Orb of Probability,

  by Nat Schachner

  Astounding June 1935

  Novelette - 12945 words

  I.

  THE YEAR 9678 did not start out as if it would prove particularly momentous. It was no different from a long line of preceding years that stretched far back into the dim and fabulous -recesses of the fourth millennium. In fact, there was a certain dull monotony, a deadly sameness about the years and centuries and millennia as they slipped imperceptibly into eternity that explained, if per
haps it did not justify, the catastrophic experiment that Fran 19 evolved out of infuriated boredom and an atavistic thirst for adventure.

  He stared with jaundiced eyes at the unending panorama of his Sector. He stood, rather than reclined, in itself a most unusual and strength-taxing effort. But then, Fran 19 was a mistake, a carelessly matched aggregation of genes. In former and less polished times he would have been quietly done to death, as a machine with ill-fitting parts is scrapped. But now even that bit of decision was too much for the Guardians of the Mating Cells. They opened somnolent eyes on that Machine that had perpetrated this grievous error, stirred slightly and perhaps uneasily, as if qualms of outmoded conscience whispered of their duty, and subsided into their original torpor.

  As a result Fran 19 lived. He was the nineteenth mating of heritable qualities which had been approved in Francis Middleton, of the First Scientific Guild.

  Inasmuch as the crude, blundering methods that nature employed for immortalizing the race were subject to incalculable mutations and twists of heredity, it was considered more scientific to employ the new technique of parthenogenesis, or unitary parental birth. Thus, the genes of Francis were stimulated to subdivision and reproduction by the use of the proper solutions, and gave rise to Francis 2. He in turn, at the calculated period when new births were necessary to counterbalance the deaths of a still mortal race, gave of his genes for the emergence of a successor. As like as peas in a pod they were—Francis 1, Francis 2, Francis 3. In the course of time, as speech became more and more monosyllabic and a tiring effort, the patronymic was shortened to Fran.

  The first Frans had remarkably short lives, to wit, between seventy and ninety years apiece, but as the momentum of that first great scientific push continued, and disease was conquered, accidents reduced, physical conditions of the exterior world tampered with, and the internal mechanism of the human body more delicately balanced, death grew more and more tardy. Fran 18 had succumbed at the age of 790 years to a certain ennui, a lack of malaise, one might say, that made the burden of this world too grievous for his languid self.

  There were even stray rumors that the present generation, of which Fran 19 was a member, was immortal, that only a definite exterior physical cause could bring oblivion and the surcease of death. Fran hoped not.

  Already, at the youthful age of 75, he dreaded the long, unending years that stretched monotonously ahead. Rather a brief existence of say 500 years, crammed with the unpredictable, with physical and mental danger and excitement, with futile but vigorous strivings toward something outside oneself, than this creeping immortality in which everything was predigested, prearranged, precalculated for them by the omnipresent Machines.

  Several times he had ventured to broach these rebellious thoughts to his friends. Friends, perhaps, was too strong a term for the pale, anemic relationship between man and man. Woman, with the abolition of the necessity of sex, had become almost indistinguishable from man. But they had edged slightly and languidly away.

  Their fluted voices whispered in tired monosyllables.

  Fran 19 was different from them, was he not? Something to do with his genes, it seemed. Made him sometimes a bit—shall we say, crude? Not like our highly civilized, polished selves. There were times when his voice was loud and raucous, when low animal vigor positively exuded from his body. Once Char 17 had seen him walking the flower-spangled turf between the vistas. All of a hundred yards, I should say. Walking? Yes, a primitive form of locomotion produced by moving one's appendages alternately forward. Fancy—and here the speaker delicately shrugged the gravity-twisting cells that extended like short vanes from his shoulders—when soaring is so simple.

  The narrator fell back on his couch exhausted. He had overtaxed his strength; he had spoken too much. For two days now he would retire into the quiet, during which period he would lie unstirring, unspeaking, unthinking, while the Feeding Machine injected liquid nourishment into his veins.

  The art of conversation was completely lost. There was no need for it. The world was a perfect mechanism. Nothing ever happened, nothing could happen, to change the even tenor of existence. Each hour was like the preceding, each day like the last, and one century much like another.

  THE MACHINES had achieved perfection back in the fifth and sixth millennia. From birth to grave they tended the human race—efficiently, tirelessly, perfectly. They dwelt in huge Machine Cities at regular intervals over the face of the earth. They dug metals from the stubborn ground; they powered themselves with smashed atoms. They sent pulsing surges of current through the ether to the subsidiary, personal Machines that tended the humans in their homes.

  Within their gleaming interiors was manufactured the synthetic food—a perfumed liquid broth—which the Feeding Machine injected directly into the veins. They catalogued and kept alive in vitreous culture the precious genes of inheritance and arranged them in the proper combinations when the Statistics Machine calculated it was time for new births.

  Fran 19 was an almost unheard-of accident. It was for rare occasions like this that a few human beings with dim memories of forbears who had been members of the Scientific Guild, maintained a nominal supervision of the Machines.

  The Machines reared the children in automatically regulated incubators. They dressed, fed and clothed the people; they propelled the gravity-twisting cells by means of which man could circumnavigate the world, if he so desired, in a few hours. But very few did. There was no reason for it. The ends of the earth were an exact reproduction of the home Sector.

  There were no deserts, no wild spaces, no glaciers, no jungles. From pole to pole the Sectors spread in endless monotony. There were no storms, no droughts, no mutable weather. A vast, unchanging blanket of warmth infolded the globe. Rain fell only when and in the circumscribed areas that it was necessary. Even the mountains were carefully trimmed and manicured. The oceans surged to the tides as of old, but no winds ruffled their broad bosoms to uneasy wrath, and huge retaining walls held them safe from harm.

  Fran 19 stared out at the placid, interminable scene for the thousandth time. But this once the usual ennui, the unutterable boredom, the feeling of being swathed in soft cotton wool, did not possess him. He was in deep thought. Little ridges of flesh puckered up his ordinarily smooth forehead, little pulses throbbed in unaccustomed parts of his body. Excitement, such as he had never known before, swept over him in dizzying waves. It was alarming—and it was thrilling.

  He turned for a last look at his crystal-inclosed laboratory. The apparatus, quiescent now, was plain for all the world to see. There were no secrets in the 97th century. Nor was there vulgar curiosity. The very fact that a human being, in this day and age, chose to exert himself unreasonably with messy wires and tubes and apparatus when the Machines were all-sufficient, gave rise to slight lifting of eyebrows, and nothing more.

  Fran 19 laughed shortly. In all the world possibly he was the only one who thought the frontiers of science had not been reached, that with human experimentation, as against the cold precision of the Machines, new theories, new concepts of the universe might be evolved. For twenty years now he had worked in his laboratory, learning from the Memory Machines the science others did not trouble to know. Then, with their assistance, he had performed all the great path-finding experiments of the past. Slowly at first, laboriously, for the Machines required new settings for the unsual work, and his own fingers were clumsy at these tasks, but later with increasing rapidity and expertness.

  One day, however, not two years before, the Tending Machines stopped all work. Not that they rebelled—they were not geared for human emotions—nor because any Guardian interfered—man was a free agent in the 97th century, unshackled by law or superior force—but because the Machines had reached the limits of the knowledge which had been originally incorporated into them and which they had been able to extend for themselves by purely mathematical and physical processes. Beyond that, to achieve new concepts, new hypotheses, if such there still remained in the universe
, something else was required, something that no machine could duplicate, something which seemingly had died from persistent disuse. Imagination!

  II.

  FOR WEEKS Fran 19 had moped and sulked at his idle Tending Machines. His imaginative processes were still atrophied. But that accidental mingling of unpedigreed genes with the pure, but unexciting strain of his ancestors, continued to ferment. A little glimmer struggled painfully through his mind. The last experiments, dealing with Wave Mechanics and the innermost structure of the electron, furnished the spark.

  He set to work again, a new grimness in the soft, hitherto unsullied lines of his face. He even immured himself for three and four hours at a time in the laboratory.

  For two years Fran worked. The Tending Machines assisted, but only under specific orders. They were beyond their depth. The Calculating Machine, of course, did all the mathematical integrations. And now it was completed—that round, crystalline globe in the farther corner, in whose transparent depths was an intricate maze of metal.

  For the moment Fran 19 was stricken with panic. He was, in spite of everything, the product of his age. He shrank from the unfathomable possibilities of this thing he had created. There was even danger—danger that had been eliminated from the world for thousands of years. It was one thing to revolt in one's soul from the ineffable peace and accompanying boredom of existence; it was another to be confronted with the fact of disorder, confusion, physical danger and the not remote probability of annihilation.

  Then his face hardened. The shiver of fear passed and left in its wake steel. The thrill of excitement, the incalculability of what faced him, even death, made him alive, as he never had been before. This was living, this was life! A song burst from his lips, tuneless, rusty. Man hadn't sung for centuries. What had there been to sing about?