Time to Come Page 2

  “I think so,” Fleming’s voice said. “I’ll try.”

  “I’ll come back with neurosurgeons,” Howard assured him. “You’ll be all right”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Fleming said. “I'm all right now.”

  Howard lost count of the hours he walked. One narrow corridor followed another, and dissolved into still more corridors. He grew tired, and his legs began to stiffen. As he walked, he ate. There were Sandwiches in his knapsack, and he munched on them mechanically, for strength.

  “Fleming,” he called finally, stopping to rest.

  After a long pause he heard a barely recognizable sound, like metal grating against metal.

  “How much longer?”

  “Not much longer,” the grating, metallic voice said. "“Tired?” •

  “Yes.”

  “I will do what I can.”

  Fleming's,voice was frightening, but silence was even more frightening. As Howard listened, he heard an engine, deep in the heart of the station, spurt into life.

  “Fleming?”

  “Yes?”

  “What is all this? Is it a bomb station?”

  “No. I do not know the purpose of the machine yet. I am still not entirely integrated.” /

  “But it does have a purpose?”

  “Yes!” The metallic voice grated so loud that Howard winced. “I possess a beautifully functional interlocking apparatus. In temperature control alone I am capable of a range of hundreds of degrees in a micro-second, to say nothing of my chemical mixing stores, power sources, and all the rest. And, of course, my purpose.”

  Howard didn’t like the answer. It sounded as though Fleming were identifying with the machine, merging his personality with that of the space station. He forced himself to ask, “Why don’t you know what it’s for yet?”

  “A vital component is missing,” Fleming said, after a pause. “An indispensable matrix. Besides, I do not have full control yet”

  More engines began to throb into life, and the walls vibrated with the sound. Howard could feel the floor tremble under him. The station seemed to be waking up, stretching, gathering its wits. He felt as though he were in the stomach of some giant sea monster.

  Howard walked for several more hours, and he left behind him a trail of apple cores, orange peels, fatty bits of meat, an empty canteen and a piece of waxed paper. He was eating constantly now, compulsively, and his hunger was dull and constant. While he ate he felt safe, for eating belonged with the space ship, and Earth.

  A section of wall slid back suddenly. Howard moved away from it.

  “Go in,” a voice, which he tentatively identified as Fleming’s, said.

  “Why? What is it?” He turned his flashlight into the hole, and saw a continuous moving strip of floor disappearing into the darkness.

  “You are tired,” the voice like Fleming’s said. “This way is faster.”

  Howard wanted to run, but there was no place to go. He had to trust Fleming, or brave the darkness on either side of his flashlight.

  “Go in.”

  Obediently Howard climbed in, and sat down on the moving track. Ahead, all he could see was darkness. He lay back.

  “Do you know what the station is for yet?” he asked the darkness.

  “Soon,” a voice answered. “We will not fail them.”

  Howard didn’t dare ask who it was Fleming wouldn’t fail. He closed his eyes and let the darkness close around him.

  The ride continued for a long time. Howard’s flashlight was' clamped under .his arm, and its beam went straight up, reflecting against the polished metal ceiling. He munched automatically on a piece of biscuit, not tasting it, hardly aware that it was in his mouth.

  Around him, the machine seemed to be talking, and it was a language he didn’t understand. He heard the labored creak of moving parts, protesting as they rubbed against each other. Then there came the liquid squirt of oil, and the pacified parts moved silently, perfectly. Engines squeaked and protested. They hesitated, coughing, then hummed pleasantly into life. And continually, through the other sounds, came the click-clack of circuits, changing, rearranging themselves, adjusting.

  But what did it mean? Lying back, his eyes closed, Howard did not know. His only touch with reality was the biscuit he had been chewing, and soon that was gone, and only a nightmare was left in its place.

  He saw the skeletons, marching across the planet, all the billions in sober lines, moving through the deserted cities, across the fat black fields, and out into space. They paraded past the dead pilot in his little spaceship, and the corpse stared at them enviously. Let me join you now, he asked, but the skeletons shook their heads pityingly, for the pilot is still burdened with flesh. When will the flesh slough away, when will he be free of its burden, asked the corpse, but the skeletons only shook their heads. When? When the machine is ready, its purpose learned. Then the skeleton billions will be redeemed, and the corpse freed of his flesh. Through his

  ruined lips the corpse pleads to be taken now. But the skeletons perceive only his flesh, and his flesh cannot abandon the food piled high in the ship. Sadly they march on, and the pilot waits within the ship, waiting for his flesh to melt away.

  “Yes!”

  Howard awakened with a start, and looked around. No skeletons, no corpse. Only the walls of the machine, close around him. He dug into his pockets, but all the food was gone. His fingers scratched up some crumbs, and he put them on his tongue.

  “Yes!”

  He had heard a voice! “What is it?” he asked.

  “I know,” the voice said triumphantly.

  “Know? Know what?”

  “My purpose!”

  Howard jumped to his feet, flashing his light around. The sound of the metallic voice echoed around him, and he was filled with a nameless dread. It seemed horrible, suddenly, that the machine should know its purpose.

  “What is your purpose?” he asked, very softly.

  In answer, a brilliant light flashed on, drowning out the feeble beam of his flashlight. Howard shut his eyes and stepped backwards, almost falling.

  The strip was motionless. Howard opened his eyes and found himself in a great brilliantly lighted room. Looking around, he saw that it was completely panelled with mirrors.

  A hundred Howards looked at him, and he stared back. Then he whirled around.

  There was no exit. But the mirrored Howards did not whirl with him. They stood silently.

  Howard lifted his right hand. The other Howards kept theirs at their sides. There were no mirrors.

  The hundred Howards began to walk forward, toward the center of the room. They were unsteady on their feet, and no intelligence showed in their dull eyes. The original Howard gasped, and threw his flashlight at them. It clattered along the floor.

  Instantaneously, a complete thought formed in his mind. This was the machine’s purpose. Its builders had foreseen the death of their species. So they constructed the machine in space. Its purpose—to create humans, to populate the planet.

  It needed an operator, of course, and the real operator never reached it. And it needed a matrix . . .

  But .these prototype Howards were obviously without intelligence. They milled around the room, moving automatically, barely able to control their limbs. And the original Howard discovered, almost as soon as the thought was born, that he was terribly wrong.

  The ceiling opened. Giant hooks descended, knives glistening with steam slid down. The walls opened, showing gigantic wheels and gears, blazing furnaces, frosty white surfaces. More and more Howards marched into the room, and the great knives and hooks cut into them, dragging Howard’s brothers toward the open walls.

  Not one of them screamed except the original Howard.

  “Fleming!” he shrieked. “Not me. Not me, Fleming!”

  Now it all added up; the space station, built at a time when war was decimating the planet. The operator, who had reached the machine only to die before he could enter. And his cargo of food . . . wh
ich, as operator, he would never have eaten.

  Of course! The population of the planet had been nine or ten billion! Starvation must have driven them to this final war. And all the time the builders of the machine fought against time and disease, trying to save their race . . .

  But couldn’t Fleming see that he was the wrong matrix?

  The Fleming-machine could not, for Howard fulfilled all the conditions. The last thing Howard saw was the sterile surface of a knife flashing toward him.

  And the Fleming-machine processed the milling Howards, cut and sliced them, deep-froze and packaged them neatly, into great stacks of fried Howard, roast Howard, Howard with cream sauce, Howard with brown sauce, three-minute boiled Howard, Howard on the half-shell, Howard with pilaff, and especially Howard salad.

  The food-duplicition process was a success! The war could end, because now there was more than enough food for everyone. Food! Food! Food for the starving billions on Paradise II!

  PHOENIX

  Clark Ashton Smith

  Rodis and Hilar had climbed from their natal caverns to the top chamber of the high observatory tower. Pressed close together, for warmth -as well as love, they stood at an eastern window looking forth on hills and valleys dim with perennial starlight. They had come up to watch the rising of the sun: that sun which they had never seen except as an orb of blackness, occluding the zodiacal stars in its course from horizon to horizon.

  Thus their ancestors had seen it for millenniums. By some freak of cosmic law, unforeseen, and inexplicable to astronomers and physicists, the sun’s cooling had been comparatively sudden, and the earth had not suffered the long-drawn complete desiccation of such planets as Mercury and Mars. Rivers, lakes, seas, had frozen solid; and the air itself had congealed, all in a term of years historic rather than geologic. Millions of the earth’s inhabitants had perished, trapped by the glacial ice, the centigrade cold. The rest, armed with all the resources of science, had found time to entrench themselves against the cosmic night in a world of ramified caverns, dug by atomic excavators far below the surface.

  Here, by the light of artificial orbs, and the heat drawn from the planet’s still-molten depths, life went on much as it had done in the outer world. Trees, fruits, grasses, grains, vegetables, were grown in isotope-stimulated soil or hydroponic gardens, affording food, renewing a breathable atmosphere. Domestic animals were kept; and birds flew; and insects crawled or fluttered. The rays considered necessary for life and health were afforded by the sunbright lamps that shone eternally in all the caverns.

  Little of the old science was loch; but, on the other hand, there was now little advance. Existence had become the conserving of a fire menaced by inexorable night. Generation by generation a mysterious sterility had lessened the numbers of the race from millions to a few thousands. As time went on, a similar sterility began to affect animals; and even plants no longer flourished with their first abundance. No biologist could determine the cause with certainty.

  Perhaps man, as well as other terrestrial life-forms, was past his prime, and had begun to undergo collectively the inevitable senility that comes to the individual. Or perhaps, having been a surface-dweller throughout most of his evolution, he was inadaptable to the cribbed and prisoned life, the caverned light and air; and was dying slowly from the deprivation of things he had almost forgotten.

  Indeed, the world that had once flourished beneath a living sun was little more than a legend now, a tradition preserved by art and literature and history. Its beetling Babelian cities, its fecund hills and plains, were swathed impenetrably in snow and ice and solidified air. No living man had gazed Upon it, except from the night-bound towers maintained as observatories.

  Still, however, the dreams of men were often lit by primordial memories, in which the sun shone on rippling waters and waving trees and grass' And their waking hours were sometimes touched by an undying nostalgia for the lost earth.

  Alarmed by the prospect of racial extinction, the most able and brilliant savants had conceived a project that was seemingly no less desperate than fantastic. The plan, if executed, might lead to failure or even to the planet’s destruction. But all the necessary steps had now been taken toward its launching.

  'It was of this plan that Rodis and Hilar spoke, standing clasped in each other’s arms, as they waited for the rising of the dead sun.

  “And you must go?” said Rodis, with averted eyes and voice that quavered a little.

  “Of course. It is a duty and an honor. I am regarded as the foremost of the younger atomicists. -The actual placing and timing of the bombs will devolve largely upon me.”

  “But—are you sure of success? There are so many risks, Hilar.” The girl shuddered, clasping her lover with convulsive tightness.

  “We are not sure of anything,” Hilar admitted. “But, granting that our calculations.are correct, the multiple charges of fissionable materials, including more than half the solar elements, should start chain-reactions that will restore the sun to its former incandescence. Of course, the explosion may be too sudden and too violent, involving the nearer planets in the formation of a nova. But we do not believe that this will happen—since an explosion of such magnitude would require instant disruption of all the sun’s elements. Such disruption should not .occur without a starter for each separate atomic structure. Science has never been able to break down all the known elements. If it had been, the earth itself would undoubtedly have suffered destruction in the old atomic wars.”

  Hilar paused, and his eyes dilated, kindling with a visionary fire.

  “How glorious,” he went on, “to use for a purpose of cosmic renovation the deadly projectiles designed by our forefathers only to blast and destroy. Stored in sealed caverns, they have not been used since men abandoned the earth’s surface so many millenniums ago. Nor have the old spaceships been used either. ... An interstellar drive was never perfected; and our voyagings were always limited to the other worlds of our own system—none of which was inhabited, or inhabitable. Since the sun’s cooling and darkening, there has been no object in visiting any of them. But the ships too were stored away. And the newest and speediest one, powered with anti-gravity magnets, has been made ready for our voyage to the sun.”

  Rodis listened silently, with an awe that seemed to have subdued her misgivings, while Hilar continued to speak of the tremendous project upon which he, with six other chosen technicians, was about to embark. In the meanwhile, the black sun rose slowly into heavens thronged with the cold ironic blazing of innumerable stars, among which no planet shone. It blotted out the sting of the Scorpion, poised at that hour above the eastern hills. It- was smaller but nearer than the igneous orb of history and legend. In its center, like a Cyclopean eye, there burned a single spot of dusky red fire, believed to mark the eruption of some immense volcano amid the measureless and cinder-blackened landscape.

  To one standing in the ice-bound valley below the observatory, it would have seemed that the tower’s litten window was a yellow eye that stared back from the dead earth to that crimson eye of the dead sun.

  “Soon,” said Hilar, “you will climb to this chamber— and see the morning that none has seen for a century of centuries. The thick ice will thaw from the peaks and valleys, running in streams to re-molten lakes and oceans. The liquefied air will rise in clouds and vapors, touched with the spectrum-tinted splendor of the light. Again, across earth, will blow the winds of the four quarters; and grass and flowers will grow, and trees burgeon from tiny saplings. And man, the dweller in closed caves and abysses, will return to his proper heritage.”

  “How wonderful it all sounds,” murmured Rodis. “But . . . you will come back to me?”

  “I will come back to you ... in the sunlight,” said Hilar.

  The space-vessel Phosphor lay in a huge cavern beneath that region which had once been known as the Atlas Mountains. The cavern’s mile-thick roof had been partly blasted away by atomic disintegrators. A great circular shaft slanted upward to the
surface, forming a mouth in the mountain-side through which the stars of the Zodiac were visible. The prow of the Phosphor pointed at the stars.

  All was now ready for its launching. A score of dignitaries and savants, looking like strange ungainly monsters in suits and helmets worn against the spatial cold that had invaded the cavern, were present for the occasion. Hilar and his six companions had already gone aboard the Phosphor and had closed its air-locks.

  ' Inscrutable and silent behind their metalloid helmets, the watchers waited. There was no ceremony, no speaking or waving of farewells; nothing to indicate that a world’s destiny impended on the mission of the vessel.

  Like mouths of fire-belching dragons the stem-rockets flared, and the Phosphor, like a wingless bird, soared upward through the great shaft and vanished.

  Hilar, gazing through a rear port, saw for a few moments the lamp-bright window of that tower in which he had stood so recently with Rodis. The window was a golden spark that swirled downward in abysses of devouring night—and was extinguished. Behind it, he knew, his beloved stood watching the Phosphor’s departure. It was a symbol, he mused ... a symbol of life, of memory ... of the suns themselves ... of all things that flash briefly and fall into oblivion.

  But such thoughts, he felt, should be dismissed. They were unworthy of one whom his fellows had appointed as a light-bringer, a Prometheus who should rekindle the dead sun and re-lumine the dark world.

  There were no days, only hours of eternal starlight, to measure the time < in which they sped outward through the void. The rockets, used for initial propulsion, no longer flamed astern; and the vessel flew in darkness, except for the gleaming Argus eyes of its ports, drawn now by the mighty gravitational drag of the blind sun.

  Test-flights had been considered unnecessary for the Phosphor. All its machinery was in perfect condition; and the mechanics involved were simple and easily mastered. None of its crew had ever been in extraterrestrial space before; but all were well-trained in astronomy, mathematics, and die various techniques essential to a voyage between worlds. There were two navigators; one rocket-engineer; and two' engineers who would operate the powerful generators, charged with a negative magnetism reverse to that of gravity, with which they hoped to approach, circumnavigate, and eventually depart in safety from an orb enormously heavier than the system’s nine planets merged into one. Hilar and his assistant, Han Joas, completed the personnel. Their sole task was the timing, landing, and distribution of the bombs.