Another explosion! Another! The tower seemed to lean forward—the steel was melting—running away in little streams—
Another explosion! Another! The tower seemed to lean forward—the steel was melting—running away in little streams—
Another explosion! Another! The tower seemed to lean forward—the steel was melting—running away in little streams—
She moved to his side.
He put his arm around her. His free hand moved among the controls on the table.
Below them, in the heart of the tower of concrete and steel, a bull-throated roar started building up, started howling as energies beyond computation were set in motion.
"Don't be afraid," he whispered. "I think it won't hurt very long."
She was still smiling.
Goggling, Tompkins read the description.
"Perhaps as the result of a direct bomb hit, but more likely as the result of the release by Garth himself of some super-powerful explosive that burned but did not explode, the tower vanished in flame. The concrete glowed red, then appeared to run, then quivered for a moment like jelly. There was a blast of furious heat which forced back the attackers. The tower puffed into dust.
"There is now no question but that Garth was responsible for the people who vanished. They stopped disappearing when the tower dissolved. What Garth was attempting no one knows, but he escaped the stern justice that would have been meted out to him by committing suicide."
"By the great Godfrey!" Tompkins muttered. "That fellow had discovered atomic power. What he was using it for, I don't know. But he had it. Nothing else could produce a result like that. He had it. And I let it get away! I called Sullivan off, because that story in the paper about Garth predicting the end of the earth made me think he was a cracked fool. But he had atomic power. And I could have had it, if I hadn't called Sullivan off. He had it. And I let it get away."
Back and forth across the private office, he paced, muttering.
"He had it. He had atomic power. I could have had it. But I let it get away."
For an infinitesimal fraction of a second, as inconceivable energies were somehow released, the low hills and the trees growing on the low hills seemed to writhe and twist as if the light rays were being bent by some refracting medium.
Then the translating force collapsed.
Lee Garth fell. Not far, not over a few feet. His legs buckled under him as he landed. He rolled. He stopped rolling. The ground was soft, and to his weary body it was a perfect haven for rest. Earth, soft earth, and rest. His senses reeled. As he lost consciousness, he felt someone tugging at him.
For a long time there was only the consciousness of complete relaxation, rest, surcease from striving. Rest! How he needed it.
But a confused babble of voices kept intruding. And someone was rubbing his head.
As he opened his eyes, he saw that his head was in a woman's lap. Who was she? And why should she have his head in her lap? He had never had anything to do with women. Oh. Stella. Oh....
"Mr. Garth," Stella whispered. "You had better stand up, if you can. There is going to be—trouble."
Oh, yes, trouble. There had always been trouble, but somehow he had not thought to find it here. But he got to his feet slowly.
He found himself in the center of a circle of people. Men and women. Several of the men wore blue, police uniforms. The men in blue had guns. The others had clubs. Some had rocks. Even some of the girls had rocks.
"It's Garth," he heard a voice say.
"Yeah, it's Garth all right," another voice answered.
"Gentlemen," Lee Garth said.
"Shut up!" a voice answered.
"What have you done to us, Garth?
"Yeah, that's what we want to know: what have you done to us, Garth?
"Don't try to deny it! We know you did it.
"Where are we, Garth?
"You and your experiments!"
Lee Garth ran his eyes around the circle. A small, wolfish-faced chap caught his attention. He recognized the man. Martin. A newspaper man.
"Hello, Martin," Garth said.
"What the hell have you done to us, Garth?" Martin said, scowling. He was truculent. He was also scared. He had a rock in his hand.
"I—" Garth began.
A man with a club stepped forward. "Whatever you've done, I want you to un-do it, see? You brought me here. You damned well better be ready to take me back, see! And be fast about it."
"But that is impossible," Garth answered.
"What!"
"I can't take you back. I can't return you. You're here, and here you will have to stay."
Anger ran through the group like a hurricane through a forest.
"Damn you, Garth!" a voice growled.
"What do you think we are—guinea pigs?"
"You're going to take us home, or else!"
"If you think you can move us into this damned country, where there ain't a house in sight and no sign there ever was one, you've got another think coming."
"Darn you, Garth."
In all the tumult Garth heard only one voice on his side, a girl's voice.
"John Bruce," the girl said. "You give Mr. Garth a chance to explain. He didn't do this without a reason."
"Aw, Jennie," the tall youth beside her answered. "You keep out of this. Garth brought us here without asking us, and he's darned well going to take us back."
"But I can't," Lee Garth said firmly.
Silence fell.
In the silence Stella whispered. "Mr. Garth, we had better run, if we can. They won't listen, they don't want to listen. They're scared, and dangerous."
The difference between a crowd and a mob is an angry voice expressing the thoughts lurking in the minds of all.
"You can't return us, eh?" the angry voice said. "Well, we'll just fix your clock. Come on, boys!"
Lee Garth would have stayed, but Stella pushed him, got him started. He fought his way through the circle of men. Then the two were running.
The mob gave chase.
The crack of a pistol shuddered behind them. A slug tore into a tree near Garth. The gun boomed again. Angry men screamed.
Run, Garth thought. It wouldn't do much good, but the instinct was to run, to preserve life as long as possible. Run! Through the trees, up the hillside. Men were coming. Run. Was this the right turning? It was. Up the hill, up the nearer hill.
Only he couldn't run much farther. His heart was beginning to hurt. Didn't matter. Death came to everything eventually, to Xerxes, to Leonidas, to Charles Martel, to Copernicus, and Galileo. Death was coming to him at the hands of those angry, frightened men, coming quickly, unless he found what he sought, what he knew was here, somewhere.
Where was the thing he sought? He had to find it, quickly. He couldn't run much farther.
They were at the top of the nearer hill.
Then Garth saw what he was seeking.
A huge sphere. A ball made out of some strange, silvery metal. It rested on top of the nearer hill.
Garth and the girl staggered toward it.
Out from it reached twin fingers of light. The streamers touched Garth, they touched the girl.
"We're there," Garth sighed. "We've found the place. We've won. We're safe."
Yelping with the lust to kill, the men came through the woods, came up the hill.
Fingers of light reached out from the sphere. A glowing streamer touched another man. He dropped the rock he was carrying. Another man. He laid down his club.
Something rode the streamers of light. A message. It whispered to the men the light touched. Their cries ran into quick silence. They looked at each other, they looked at Garth and the girl with him. Both were leaning against the sphere. They seemed to be drawing strength from it. They were smiling.
An awed whisper ran through the men who had so recently been a mob.
"What is that thing, that ball?"
"Look at the light coming from it!"
"Say, I think we were wrong about this fellow, Garth."
"When that light touched me, I changed my mind about him."
"Let's go see what this is all about."
"Come on. Nothing is going to hurt us. I feel it."
Slowly, they approached. Anger had already left them. Now fear left them. Only awe remained.
Then a voice began to speak.
Here and there upon this earth are fields where men, looking backward, say, "Here history was made. Because of what happened here, a new world came into being."
There is a pass in Greece, a field in France, a backyard in Holland. There are fields in America too.
There is a field two million years in the future!
Dawn world or dusk world?
The sun went down the western sky. Its rays were flung over the group clustered around the globe, over the listening men, who stared quickly at each other, then away, then stole a glance at Garth, leaning against that globe. Over the frightened, clinging, awed girls, who listened too.
In the air was a voice. It came from the sphere. It went directly to the minds of the listeners, whispered as a thought current in their brains, whispered as a ghost moving among the nerve endings. The voice said:
"Thus the human race reached its goal. There were not many of us left, a few hundred only. We had reached the point where mental activity alone interested us.... Then our last genius invented what we can only describe to you as a perfect brain. It was a substance that would absorb and retain mental impulses. It would absorb and retain our mental impulses. In effect, then, it would become us.
"That substance is housed in the heart of this sphere.
"We built the sphere, set forces in it that made it, to the best of our knowledge, all powerful. We armed it with incredible weapons. We built into it the apparatus to warp space—an adaptation of the drive we once used on our space ships. Then, on the brain substance housed in the heart of this sphere, we impressed the individual consciousness of each living person, and the knowledge that each person had in his own mind, which included all the knowledge that the human race has gained in more than two million years. We blended into one mind the minds of the two hundred humans who remained alive. Housed in a substance that was eternal, sheltered in a sphere that could not be destroyed, it became an almost perfect mind. We thought it was perfect. We discarded our bodies, as outworn tools. Physically, the human race died. Mentally, it would live forever.
"One thing we had never done—flown to the stars. We had reached the planets and had almost forgotten them. But the stars in the sky we had not reached. It was the last great voyage of discovery.
"We set out for the stars. And we reached them!"
The twinkling points of light that Jan Lippershey had shown to be suns lost in the immensity of space!
The voice died into silence, seemed to rest, then whispered again.
"And near Antares a meteor swarm struck us. Inconceivable powers were housed within this sphere. We tried to escape but the swarm was moving almost as fast as light. We tried to blast the meteors into nothingness, and we succeeded in this. But we could not succeed forever. Eventually even the powers of this sphere were near exhaustion. Thousands of pea-size meteors struck us. The force of those collisions cracked the sphere itself. In time we limped back to earth, limped back to a place where we could lie up and lick our wounds.
"We discovered that the wounds would not heal, that the damage was irreparable. Energy was leaking from the sphere, a little by a little. Somehow we had erred in its construction.
"Somehow we had gone down the wrong road, had taken the wrong turning.
"We could not anticipate that this would happen, we could not see what would happen tomorrow. But we knew that our race, and your race, was dying here, that you, back in the mists of time, were moving down a road with death as your destiny.
"The drive that carries a race is not lightly ended.
"But the human race ended in us, in our error.
"It was our mistake. It was our task to correct it, if we could.
"We tried.
"We could not go back through time, but we could force our thoughts back to certain cyclic periods. We could reach only a few periods, most of them too early or too late to meet our needs. Eventually we found a time that was right and a mind that could understand. To that mind we gave instructions, to Lee Garth...."
The voice paused, sought for energy, slowly gathered it, then went on.
"That is why you were brought here—to repopulate a world, to take up where we left off, to correct an error made two million years after your time.
"We have taken the living from the remote past and used them to bridge the chasm of death. Yours to carry on."
There was silence. Men moved awkwardly, staring at each other, at that sphere, at Lee Garth. The girls, somehow, seemed to understand.
It was Scoop Martin who came out of the crowd, stood apologetically before Lee Garth.
"Mr. Garth, sir, is that right, what we heard?"
Scoop's wolfish face was a mask of fear, doubt, and hesitation.
Garth swallowed. He nodded.
"But—" the reporter gestured toward the globe. "How can men be in that?"
Garth answered slowly. "A lot can be learned in two million years. It is not impossible. You, the you that really exists, your mind, your consciousness, is a movement of thought within a suitable medium. Evolution provided a chemical medium, a mass of tissue, your brain. That is all you really are, the movement of current within your brain cells.... The men who came two million years after us found a better medium than the brain. Upon that better medium, they impressed their thinking."
Garth hesitated, and when he spoke, it was not to Martin, but to someone else.
"Is that not right?"
There was a rustle in the air. A voice whispered.
"In essence, that is correct. It was not so simple as that, but you have the underlying thought. In the year that we have yet to live, we will teach you the process. Perhaps you may discover our error. Perhaps you will want to use other methods. We cannot advise on that point. The only thing that matters is that the race must go on to whatever is its ultimate destiny."
Sighing with the pulse of failing energy, the whisper ceased.
The group stirred again, moving restlessly.
"I'm sorry," Garth spoke, "that I did not ask your permission to bring you here. But I had no choice. If I had asked for volunteers to repopulate the world of two million years from our time, you would have concluded I was crazy. So I had to bring you here without consulting you."
They didn't seem to hear him. They stirred uneasily. All malice was gone out of them. Only unease and trembling wonder were left.
Martin twisted. He spoke.
"We have to rebuild—to repopulate—a world. That's why we're here?"
Garth swallowed, fighting the lump in his throat. He nodded.
"It seems hard to understand, sir," Martin said. "But what can I do to help?"
The lump in Garth's throat rose so high he could not swallow it.
A bulky figure in uniform came out of the crowd. "What can I do, Mr. Garth, to help?"
There was a confused babble of voice. "What can we do, Mr. Garth, to help?"
In that babble he heard only one voice, that of the girl at his side, asking what she might do.
"You might remember," he answered, "that—that my name is Lee."
And when, during the shadow night that followed, the descendents of the dogs the race had left behind them howled on the hills for their lost masters, now there came an answer. Men whistled to them. Slowly, hesitantly, fearfully, but gaining confidence as the whistles of men roused half lost memories, the dogs came down from the hills to their new masters.
Here and there, upon this earth, are fields.