Time Travel Omnibus, page 196
It was now no longer a local French problem, outwardly sympathized with, and secretly exulted at, by her neighbors. It was obvious even to the dullest that the invaders had set themselves a methodical course. The original expedition had brought a new form of life, beyond all human knowledge, to colonize the Earth. What had made them migrate in their strange spaceships from their far-distant former home was a mystery. It might have been a stellar cataclysm that swept their world to destruction; it might have been the pressure of superior enemies from whom they fled. The secret of their journey, just as the secret of their habitat and appearance, remained a mystery until the end.
THE SCIENTISTS again talked learnedly: Of life forms who propagated themselves at ten-week intervals, ten offspring at a time, in fission like the amoeba or in spores like the Monocystics. Of reproduction in geometric progression. Of life that fed on mineral soil, free of vegetable or animal contagion. Of earthly elements fashioned by some strange super-science into a new element, hitherto unknown to spectroscopy, with an atomic weight of 112, and glowing with fierce, electronic energy. Of creatures as remote from protoplasmic carbon compounds as it was possible to be.
The scientists talked, but the plain man in the streets knew that the world was doomed. At such a rate of propagation the invasion must accelerate until all Earth was covered with the green-glowing bubbles and their unknown occupants. Within a year at the most—
Enemy nations forgot their nationalistic ambitions in the face of the common peril. The armies and the battle planes of the world converged. General staffs fused and subordinated to a single generalissimo. The laboratories of Earth pooled their resources. Everything else was forgotten except the onsweeping, inexorable expansion of the bubbles.
At the end of the third ten-week period half of Europe was laid waste. This time, though the destruction was infinitely greater, the loss of life was not as great in proportion. Only a million were caught in the fiery bath. The rest had emigrated.
It was the greatest hegira known in the history of the human race. Hundreds of millions partook in terror-stricken flight. They poured into the desert places of Asia; they shrieked and fought desperately for footholds on every possible means of transportation. They clung like black flies to the tops of railroad cars, they clung to the rails of transatlantic steamers, in their madness they even sought precarious perch on the wings of airplanes. A million dollars was offered for an old plane that rested in a museum, and was refused.
Thousands were crushed in stampedes; overburdened ships and aircraft went down without a trace. Famine swept away its thousands; typhus and cholera took more.
Then even Asia was no longer safe, and a new rush started to the Americas, to Africa, to far-off Australia. And always, at inexorable ten-week intervals, the existing bubbles split into new swarms that expanded outward in an ever-widening circle, and blasted everything out of their path.
The general staff gave up its futile bombardments. If Earth was to be saved, it must find its salvation in the laboratories. Hundreds of thousands of men and women scientists were working feverishly, desperately on the problem. Find some weapon, some means of offense that will break element 112 and destroy everything within its sheltering walls! That was the order issued.
“Easier said than done!” groaned Godfrey Talcott, ruffling his gray hair with a despairing gesture. “All we know about the element is what has been observed at a safe distance through telespectroscopes. We can’t lay our hands on a sample to analyze or test it. And I’d say only a full, efficient use of subatomic power could touch it.”
“That’s our problem, then,” retorted Raymond Trent, looking up from the cyclotron he was manipulating. “We’ve already made a start along the path. We’ve broken down uranium atoms with neutron bullets, and released almost ten percent of the total energy. We’ve harnessed that power for explosive bullets, for stratosphere planes, and the first rocket lifted last year some five hundred miles out into space before its drive gave out and it fell back.”
“Of course it can be done,” Talcott said impatiently. “But it takes time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor did any great scientific discovery, immediately practicable, come fully perfected out of the laboratories—all fiction to the contrary. We have only the vaguest idea of the principles involved. Patient experimentation is required, long months and years of mathematical calculations, tentative blueprints, testings, scrappings, new blueprints, new experiments. Good Lord, man! I’d say fifty years is not too much.”
“Fifty years?” Ray Trent echoed. His blue eyes squinted. “Might as well ask for eternity.” He strode to the newscaster, flipped it open. The International Broadcasting Co. announcer swam into view. His hand trembled as he read the latest flash.
“Leningrad,” he was shouting, all suavity forgotten, “has just radioed. Moscow is destroyed and covered by the invaders. The southwestern part of Russia is a smoking ruin. The Soviets announce they are moving the seat of their government to Irkutsk, on Lake Baikal. From Cairo comes a report—”
RAY flicked him off. He was still young, slightly under thirty. His face was twisted into a hard grimace; his eyes burned. He was a good physicist, but from college days his imaginative mind had preferred to play around with the larger philosophic conceptions of his subject—time, space, the nature of eternity, origins, endings. With an independent income at his disposal, left to him by a thoughtful father who had made his pile in manufacturing motors, he had immersed himself in a combination library, den and laboratory of his own choosing. There had pondered deeply on abstract matters and contrived curious little models which he never showed to visitors.
Since the coming of the spacemen, however, every available scientist had been impressed into the desperate effort to find some method of combatting their geometrically progressive spread. Ray Trent joined up by choice with Godfrey Talcott, his former teacher at the university. Talcott had a reputation as an authority in electronics. He was about fifty, tall, stooped, gray, and with a long, thin nose. He preferred working by himself, with a single assistant, rather than in a huge laboratory, surrounded by bewildering equipment and an obsequious group of underlings.
“They get underfoot,” he complained, and took Ray off with him to his private little affair near Boston.
Ray said quietly now, without any bitterness. “You asked for fifty years? Within a year at the utmost the whole earth will be taken over, and “not a human being left alive. Europe is gone; Asia and Africa are next in line. Then—” He shrugged eloquently.
Harsh lines etched themselves into the older man’s face. “A miracle may happen, though I don’t believe much in miracles. And only if a sufficient number of scientists work simultaneously on the problem, and without interruptions. But if we are compelled to move from place to place, always fleeing the advance, even a century wouldn’t be enough.”
“Right, and I have an idea. Suppose we shift our best men and the minimum of essential equipment down into Antarctica, where, from the looks of things, mankind will make its last stand.”
“You’re crazy, Ray,” Talcott exploded.
The blond young man shook his head. “Not in the least. It’s our only possible chance. There are already meteorological stations dotting the ice. They’re pretty well scattered, yet close enough for plane and radio communication. Thirty or forty laboratories, working independently, yet with instant cooperation, freed for almost a year from the sickening disruption of flight from endangered areas, might find something within the limited time to save at least a remnant of the human race from total destruction.”
“I still say you’re crazy,” insisted Talcott. “But it’s the only decent suggestion I’ve heard since this infernal mess started. I’ll get in touch with the general staff at once.”
THREE WEEKS later the vast icecap called Antarctica hummed with unusual activity. Before there had been solitary wastes, broken only by inconspicuous stations and semiannual relief ships. Now cargo planes hurtled through snow and blizzard and furious storm to unload equipment and somewhat befuddled scientists in a last desperate stand against the ever-expanding death.
Trent and Talcott took over the station that perched precariously on the high interior plateau where the south pole made a mathematical point. The older physicist stared out at the wilderness of ice and snow, dim and spectral in the endless gloom of the south-winter night. “I still don’t know why you picked on this most God-forsaken spot of all, Ray,” he complained. “The storms howl down here at their worst; even the stratosphere planes may not be able to get through when we need extra equipment in a hurry. Now down on the coast—”
Trent looked at him queerly. “I wanted isolation; plenty of it,” he said in a strange voice. I didn’t want anyone to know what we are trying to do.”
Talcott said, startled: “What do you mean?”
“You remember back in Boston you said it would take at least fifty years to uncover the secret of destructive weapons with full atomic power?”
The older scientist made a hopeless gesture. “Of course. But we’ve got to keep trying. Besides, what’s that got to do with our being isolated?”
Trent’s answer was another question. “Suppose,” he said slowly, “I could manage to span that fifty years for you—or even a hundred, if necessary—and present you with weapons already made and fashioned that could blast the invaders to pieces—without worrying about the theory involved?”
“And how, my fine young friend,” demanded the other sarcastically, “will you provide me with these weapons?”
“By going into the future—that fifty or a hundred years ahead you were talking about—and bringing them back with me.”
Talcott got up slowly. “I think,” he said with careful intonation, “that perhaps this place has already gotten you. Suppose I send you back to one of the base—”
The younger man grinned. “My craziness is no longer a matter of mere metaphor, eh, Talcott? But I never was more sane in my life.”
“And how, please, will you manage to go into the future?”
“With a time machine!”
Talcott blinked, snorted. “It can’t be the heat, so it must be the cold. Whoever heard of a time-traveling device outside of fiction?”
“That’s no reason to believe the problem can’t be solved,” Trent retorted. “Ever since I quit college I’ve been fooling around with the idea. You may remember that time and space, as abstract qualities, were always my obsession. I’ve gone through the intricate mathematical formulas involved; I was even compelled to create a new method of analysis and re-synthesis to solve my equations. That’s all completed. I was on the verge of commencing the actual construction when the invasion broke.” Talcott stared incredulously. “And you think you can build a machine to take you into the future?”
“I don’t know,” Trent admitted. “That’s why I wanted this total isolation. I didn’t want the rest of the scientific world to relax their own efforts along the lines of super-atomic power. Human nature is such they might just sit back and wait for us to succeed. Our chances are slim, but theirs partakes, as you said, of the order of a miracle.” He shook his head. “Only a time machine will solve the problem; nothing else.”
In spite of himself, Talcott looked interested. “What’s the theory?”
“An electro-magnetic warping of the space-time continuum,” Trent explained. “The machine, if it works, will slide around the world line of events and reappear at any specified time and place.”
The older man sighed. “I suppose you’re right. It’s our only chance, slim and far-fetched as that may be. How about the equipment?”
Trent grinned. “I’ve already arranged for that. It’s all packed down here as my private baggage.”
“We-e-ll!” sniffed Talcott. “I was wondering how much evening clothes you were bringing along. All right, suppose we get to work.”
FOR NINE MONTHS they labored. It was back-breaking, brain-stupefying, nerve-destroying toil. The long antarctic night turned into perpetual day. Incredible blizzards roared over them and sealed them within mountainous drifts. The temperature rose and fell again. The last cargo plane came and went. Its pilots were frightened. “You’re wasting your time!” they cried. “It’s all over. The human race is wiped out. We’re practically the last—”
But Talcott and Trent did not hear. They did not sleep; they had only snatches to eat. Day and night, the alternation of seasons, were but vague patterns to them. Only one thing mattered—the swift progression of calendar days as they flung desperately into their work.
Their minds bleared with formulas; they set up new apparatus, feverishly ripped it down to start afresh; they built strange cages and dismantled them; they impressed cosmic rays and alpha rays into service; they twisted elements with furious distortions, seeking always the warping, electro-magnetic action called for by Trent’s equations. Time and again they thought they were on the proper track, only to meet with sudden blank walls. The solution showed dimly, tantalizingly ahead; but always success eluded them. And they had only weeks now.
Once a week they forced themselves, bleary-eyed, muscles jerking with supreme weariness, to listen to the radio. There were only a few announcers left, and fewer stations, and their news was increasingly tragic.
Europe was gone, Asia and Africa as well; North America baked with searing fires; Brazil lay panting under the swarming bubbles. The southern part of South America and Australia were black upheavals of refugee humanity. Hundreds of millions had died, but hundreds of millions were compressed into smaller and smaller spaces, fleeing the ever-advancing destruction.
Famine and fierce, internecine warfare took immense tolls. Civilization had reverted to savagery; a crust of bread, a foot of ground on which to stand, meant murder and sudden death. The tortured atmosphere and the more tortured sea, writhing under the insupportable burden of the blasting heat, rose in rebellion. Furnacelike siroccos swept over the still-untouched areas; a boiling sea, augmented by melting glaciers, roared in tidal floods over the hapless swarms.
At the end of the ninth month the last overwhelming news sputtered through. It came from the high continental barrier, not five hundred miles from where they listened. There was no other sending station to be heard. The newscaster spoke in a dull monotone. His capacity for emotion had long since drained away.
“The bubbles have spawned again,” he said drearily. “Of what was once our earth only this desolate bit of ice and mountain is left. Australia and the South Sea Islands are gone; all South America down to the tip of Patagonia. A few people still perch precariously on Tierra del Fuego; some thousands more swarm on the bleak Grahams; fifty thousand all told have managed, by plane and by boat, to get away in time to reach the ice. There is food for perhaps three months.”
Then his nerve broke. He looked out from the screen with an insane giggle. “Three months’ food. More than enough. We can throw part of it away. In ten weeks time the bubbles spawn again. Do you understand?” His voice grew high-pitched. “In ten weeks’ time we all die; we, the heirs of billions of years. We die, and those damned gyrations from hell take over.” He glared at his unseen audience; his face seemed to be an independent mask, jerked by casual strings. “We die!” he sobbed. “I, the last announcer, tell you so. Damn them! Damn you! Damn us all!”
Still screaming, he picked up an iron bar, threw it at the silver mesh. There was a blinding flash; then dark silence.
Ray Trent lifted his head. “That’s the end, Talcott,” he said quietly. “His nerves couldn’t stand it any more. He smashed the last sending station. We’ll hear no more; we’re cut off from the world.”
The older man’s shoulders sagged. “What does it matter? You heard what he said. In ten weeks more we’re all dead—all our hopes and ambitions; our plans for the future. Wiped out, erased from the memory of the universe as though we had never been.”
Ray stared at the complex of equipment. “Ten weeks more!” He seemed to be speaking to himself. “Ten weeks in which to find the secret and create a weapon to save the poor remnant of humanity.” He turned suddenly on Talcott. “Can we do it?”
THE SCIENTIST shook his head. “I said in the beginning only a miracle could do the trick. For a while I thought you might be able to supply the miracle. Now that seems over.” He clenched his veined fists. “God!” he choked. “If only they hadn’t come for another fifty years. We wouldn’t have to worry about time machines then. We are on the direct path. Subatomic power is there. It’s only a matter of time; of normal, patient experimentation. Fifty years only, a half century; a mere instant in eternity—yet more than eternity to us now.”
Ray Trent had been sitting, his head in his hands. Now he got up excitedly. “Look, Talcott,” he said. “You gave me an idea. Suppose we contact the coast and get a picked group—not over a dozen-men and women. Suppose, in the ten weeks left us, you and they will burrow deep under the ice here, into the rocky, underlying core. We have power enough on tap to fashion a hollow chamber, stock it with supplies, arrange for constant aeration, and set up a laboratory. Down there, sealed in from heat and cold, they can live, marry, rear children, concentrate every energy on a single problem—the completion of my time machine.”
“And suppose it never succeeds?”
Trent shrugged. “Then they’ll have to plug away at the original problem of atomic power. That will take nearer a hundred years under the cramped and restricted surroundings. Perhaps their children’s children will find the answers. With weapons so powered they’ll be able to reconquer the earth.”
Talcott looked doubtful. “It’s a dreary gamble. However, I’ll get them together at once. There’s a base at Little America I can contact on our transmitter. Endersby is down there. He’s a good man. I’ll have him pick the dozen and fly up here with food and equipment.”
