Les spat in the other's direction. "Don't let me get within grabbing
distance of that gun," he told Blaine. Disdainfully, he turned his back
and faced Tansie.
"Is it true?"
She looked at Blaine.
Blaine said, in a cold voice, "Tell him the truth, Tansie--or I'll kill
_him_."
Ackerman turned again. "Truth?" he sneered. "Truth at the point of a
gun? 'Truth' in this case is forcing Tansie to make a statement that
you approve. Truth! Bah!"
Tansie looked at Ackerman, then at Blaine; this was an event she
had not counted on. Tansie had believed that the history she
knew--unwritten but known--was truth, despite its happening in the
future respective to 'Real Time.' She had been wondering about
predestination and the resulting futility of all effort; this seemed
to prove to her that this nebulous life was still subject to change at
the whim of chance. But Ackerman was important, and even though his
definition of truth was correct in this case, he must not be destroyed.
She looked at Blaine and then at Ackerman; the collapse of all her
hopes had stricken her dumb.
Tears were close to the surface. Tears for herself, for her hopes--and
for Les Ackerman. Yet there was a chance. Les must not be destroyed,
even at the expense of her own life; Blaine knew that, which was why he
threatened Ackerman instead of her.
Calvin Blaine lifted the carbine.
Les Ackerman measured his chances and decided against them, for the
moment at least.
With hidden tears stinging her eyes, Tansie Lee held up her left hand.
Ackerman looked down and saw it. Very plain, very formal, as lacking in
surface glitter as Tansie had seemed--Les wondered whether the simple
serenity of the wedding ring was as false a cover for cheap green brass
as--as--
_You damned fool!_ he told himself. _You trebly underlined,
capital-lettered idiot! A soft glance, warm lips, and an
almost-invitation--and you forget yourself!_
The blind, stupid haze cleared from Ackerman's bewildered mind and he
looked into Tansie Lee's face. She had been looking at him, searching
his face carefully. But she had seen his expression, and was turning
away. Ackerman watched her go, coldly. _A fool_, he said to himself,
_is a man who makes the same mistake twice!_
Tansie walked away, her shoulders down, her warmly-rich figure gaunt,
and the line and soul of dejection.
* * * * *
Calvin Blaine coughed and said: "Sorry, Ackerman. This is mostly for
self-defence. I knew she'd work on you very well before I got to
you--and I knew that she'd work well enough to drive you into blind
fury at the first mention of her perfidy."
"I don't understand all of this," said Ackerman. His voice was hard and
his attitude one of complete indifference. "What's going on, anyway?"
"You've heard of two countries, or two men fighting for their lives?"
"Yes."
"Ackerman, you started this. Unwittingly, of course. Bombardment of
Element X--which we call _Temperon_--produced a freak field of force
that caused a division in the universal stream of time. It has never
happened before and it will never happen again according to the
probabilities--no one knows what happened.
"This, Ackerman, produced a twin existance. Two probabilities that stem
from a dual explosion in your laboratory. In one, there was a complete
success to your work; in the other, there was total destruction of your
effort. Not only did you split the world into twin existances through
'time', Ackerman, but you also split it definitely into twin camps of
reasoning. Your work was based upon findings that came from countries
that were enemies not many years before. Figuratively, you stood on the
shoulders of scientific wisdom to prepare your manuscript of facts on
the element temperon.
"Your work was an indictment of any policy that would hamstring the
free interchange of ideas, concepts, work, and success. It was living
proof that all men contribute to the advancement of civilization
whether they be good, not so good, bad, quick, dead, friend or one-time
enemy.
"The other existance, however, has your evidence that men were plodding
through the uncharted seas of boundless energy and power--"
"But I was not!" stated Ackerman.
"You know that and your fellows know it. But your scientific fellows
are a minority, and many of them doubt their own figures. They know
only that _something_ blew you and your laboratory off of the face of
the earth, and they all wonder why--even those who claim to _know_
that you were working with nothing dangerous.
"Therefore, Ackerman, because you and your kind were obviously playing
with a field of work that might cause the destruction of the universe,
research is throttled and controlled to within an inch of its life.
There is no leaping from an unfounded theory to cold mathematics to
foregone conclusion like a fast double-play from short to second to
first. To bombard a ten milligram sample of anything never before
bombarded, the scientist must make ten ten-hour bombardments, adding
one milligram each time."
"Well--where do I come in?" asked Ackerman.
"You have the answer to mankind's life in your brain," replied Blaine.
"We need your help."
"That's about what Tansie Lee was telling me." Ackerman's mind
underwent a very brief session of self-denunciation at the thought of
Tansie.
"I'll show you," he said. "My ship is hard by. I'll show you, Ackerman,
the destruction of a solar system by men who know too little about the
stuff with which they work."
Ackerman shrugged uncertainly. "I'm not Solomon, nor even one of his
seventh-assistant helpers," he said thoughtfully. "But it strikes me
that there is as much danger letting everybody play with atomic fire as
there is in throttling all brainwork."
Blaine laughed heartily. "Any kind of fire," he said between shouts of
admiring laughter. "Even firewater! They tried complete prohibition
once and people started to make everything from Allyl Acetate to
xylylene glycol in their cellars! No one yet has thought of legislation
forcing everybody to swizzle a quart a day, and even the flushest of
lushes doesn't offer drinks to kids. No, Ackerman, you're to be proven
correct."
"Why?"
"That's partly why we need your help," said Blaine. "People have been
bootlegging science to a dangerous degree. In the other existance,
people have been taking a free and untrammelled holiday. In the future
to which we're going, you'll see the answer. Men have learned the folly
of fighting one another, Ackerman, but they have also learned the way
across the strait of 'time'. Burning up my world by atomics will not
cause their own world to die."
"Doesn't that give them both a future?"
Blaine clapped Ackerman on the shoulder and smiled sorrowfully. "They
cannot cross materially," he said. "They can blast only with energy.
Yet, even so, there is jealousy, hate, and malice. Remember this,
Lester Ackerman: what man cannot conquer, man destroys!"
* * * * *
Calvin Blaine's ship was about the same as Tansie's. Blaine motioned
Ackerman in and followed, closing the door. From the controls, up
in the pilot's deck, came a musical voice that struck a chord in
Ackerman's mind: "You found him, dad?"
"My daughter," said Blaine unnecessarily. She came to meet them; a
golden blonde with sparklingly mischievous eyes, upturned corners of a
round, rich mouth that was also generous, and a warmly tanned skin.
"This is he, Laurie. Ackerman, my daughter, Laurie Blaine."
"How do you do, Miss Blaine."
"I do fine, usually," she told him with a laugh. "And I start at once;
you are to call me Laurie; I'll eschew formality, too, and call you
Les." She turned to her father. "Are we off in the planned direction?"
"We are. I succeeded in getting to them before any damage was done."
"Soon enough?" asked Laurie with a devilish glint in her eye. Ackerman
squirmed uncomfortably, wishing he could duck the double entendre.
Calvin Blaine recognized the possibility of Ackerman's
discomfort--possibly because Blaine was no more perfect than anyone
else. He would never tell Laurie that he had interrupted a love-scene;
she would never know unless Ackerman blurted it out.
He nodded negligently. "He didn't know who she was," he said.
Laurie smiled at Ackerman. "We know that Les Ackerman is a shy man,"
she said. "It--is becoming. But to tell you the truth, Les, I'd be
worried about a bronze statue if that woman decided to hurl herself at
its head." The way Laurie said 'That woman' was of the same tone that
one uses in describing someone who was violating the 'No Spitting'
ordinance in the subway. "You're still pure and simple?" she asked him
with a laugh.
"I'm simple, anyway."
"Good; I'm not too bright in some things. Dad's tried to tell me about
temperon. I'm baffled; what's temperon?"
* * * * *
Ackerman took a deep breath and was frankly glad to get off of the
tender subject of his affections and onto a more stable discussion of
material physics.
"It's an involved yarn," said Ackerman. "Back in the nineteen-thirties,
a scientist by the name of Enrico Fermi was successful in bombarding
almost every element with neutrons, and succeeded in most cases by
raising the atomic number of most of them. The neutron, you see,
enters the nucleus, making the nuclear mass too great for the nuclear
charge. The nucleus then re-establishes stability over a time by
emitting a beta particle, transforming, in effect, one of the neutrons
to a proton. Now the top of the periodic chart is uranium, and Fermi
wondered what he would get if he tried to raise the top-number."
"That was plutonium?" asked Laurie.
"Neptunium first, then plutonium. After the Second War, science took
up again, investigating for the sake of learning more about their
surroundings. Plutonium was top-number for not too long. Element
ninety-five came next, and ninety-six followed soon. We were working
on element number one hundred and forty-four; that is the one called
temperon."
"There are that many elements above the former top?"
"There are, theoretically, an infinite number of elements. Most of the
top elements are unstable--that is, radioactive. Fissionable elements
occur more and more frequently in the top brackets. No one has ever
seen element one hundred and eight, you know; it fissions automatically
as soon as it is made."
"How do you hurdle it, then?"
"Bombard it with deuterons, which raises the charge one number and the
mass two numbers. It isn't easy, but it works." He looked at Laurie
with curiosity. For an avowed lack of education in atomics, Laurie knew
the proper questions to ask. He wondered whether her interest was as
great or her desire for knowledge as deep as she said--or whether she
were doing her best to put him at ease by leading him into talk about
the subject he liked best.
Then, surprisingly, she looked him in the eye and winked with a brazen
leer. She stood up and headed for the kitchen, knowing that he would
follow. When he arrived, she was busily mixing drinks. He smiled. It
was an excellent grade of scotch; he said so.
The drink relaxed him.
Laurie took the third drink in to her father. "Good for the soul," he
said to Ackerman, lifting the glass.
"It is," he said heartily.
Then Calvin Blaine drew Ackerman's story out. Blaine was genuinely
interested in the true history of the world, and enjoyed listening
to Ackerman's description of the events that took place during the
World War II and afterwards. "First hand telling," said Blaine. "It
held cards, spades, and big casino over the books." The drinks helped
Ackerman to relax, and before he knew it, the aroma of fine steak was
filling the ship.
Laurie, too, was an excellent cook.
4
It was, said Les Ackerman as he awoke, an eventful sixty hours since
the eventful partial explosion on his laboratory. And in twenty-six
hours since Tansie Lee had found him at six o'clock the previous
morning, Les had travelled several hundred years and a good many
millions of miles in space.
_Not bad_, he thought, _for someone who does not exist._
He stretched and turned over for another forty winks, and was dozing
when the door opened and Laurie Blaine came in with coffee, which she
held temptingly under his nose until he reached for it, and then held
completely out of reach.
"Come and get it," she said mischievously.
"I don't dare," he laughed.
"How will I know that you're getting up?" she asked suspiciously.
"Take my word for it; that smells like tomorrow morning."
"Well," she said brightly, "in case you're interested, this _is_
tomorrow morning. Get up!"
"You get out and I'll get up," he told her.
Then from the doorway, Calvin called: "Better; we're not long nor far
from the scene I want to show you."
"Good enough for me," replied Ackerman. "Drag that woman out of here,
will you?"
"Come on, shameless wench," laughed Blaine to his daughter. "Despite
your arguments, modesty is a virtue. Let the man get dressed in peace."
He grinned at Les. "She'd sit there and make snide remarks about your
knees," he said. "Git!" he told her.
She got. And Les was thoroughly awake and dressed in minutes.
After breakfast, Blaine took the controls himself. "We'll watch this
from a distance," he said. "I've enough power to break away from the
temporal inertia and attractive mass. We can see both sides of this
thing, which is more than those doing it can see."
There was the feeling of lift to the vehicle. It went on for an hour,
through the gray haze that pressed against the windows of the ship
while they were in motion. Then, finally, Blaine turned from the
controls and the haze cleared.
"I've accelerated the 'time-rate'," he said. "Now that we're out of the
earth's attractive temporal field."
"Why?"
"Destruction of anything the size of the earth takes time," explained
Blaine. "I've read stories in which the earth crashed into another
planet, and it took place in a matter of minutes. Forgetting that
at planetary velocities--earth is about seventeen miles per second
orbital, if I remember correctly--it takes the earth over a minute to
cover one diameter of motion. Also the chances of a real crash, like a
couple of golf balls colliding is impossible."
"Roche's Limit?" asked Ackerman. "They'd start to come apart by mutual
gravitational attraction before they hit, and the resulting crash would
be more like two spoonsful of baking powder hitting one another."
"Sounds messy," said Laurie.
Ackerman looked cheerfully sour. "It would be," he told her.
"This affair is not to be that simple," stated Blaine. "No collision.
Just beamed energy. Equally messy, though."
"The 'time' speed-up is obvious, isn't it?" asked Les, looking at the
distant earth through the telescope. "I can definitely perceive the
turning."
"We're running free at about twenty to one," said Blaine. "Earth will
turn once in about an hour and twelve minutes."
"When does the big show start?"
"Any moment now."
"But where's the green hazy fog?" asked Les. "I thought--"
"That fog is only apparent when near a body like earth. It is caused by
the diffraction of the air--you see, when you're moving through 'time',
the speed-up of air-motion causes a complete diffraction and diffusion
of all light. We're in space where there is no air."
* * * * *
As Blaine spoke, a twinkle of light burst like an exploding bomb a half
diameter to the north of the earth. The speckle of light spread and
diminished in intensity; it still cast a baleful but momentary glow
over the northern hemisphere--or not-quite-hemisphere because of its
proximity to the earth.
"That's the beginning," said Blaine.
Minutes later, a second pinprick of energy expanded. This one was
either on the surface or very close; it was hard to tell which. But
the effect was terrible. A ruddy gout of multicolored smoke and flame
spurted out, leaping from the point of contact. It raced up and away
from the surface making a tiny tuft of fluffy smoke that looked like a
wisp of cotton pulled through the cloth covering of a pillow. It was
tiny compared to the size of the earth, but the shock wave that raced
in a concentric circle away from the gout of energy--racing across the
ground in a crawling distortion--was quite visible. Its amplitude died
as it spread until it was invisible.
Minutes later, a contracting circle of shock-wave appeared. It
converged and closed down on the spot that was still covered by the
tiny cloud. There was considerable amplitude at that spot where all the
energy returned, then the concentric shock wave raced away from the
point again.
"I'd like to see the antipodes," muttered Ackerman.
"We'll see others," Blaine promised.
"That was the same shock wave, wasn't it?" Laurie wanted to know.
"Yes," said her father, watching through his telescope. "It started
from that city and spread out across the earth. On the other side, of
course, the thing converged to zero, passed through itself and spread
out again. It returned to its origin--and will continue to encircle
the earth until it dies. Each time it is less perfect because of
wave-diffraction and refraction due to a non-homogenous medium. That
tends to spread it out, makes its focal point imperfect. Its energy
will be dissipated in heat due to resistance. It will eventually die
and--"
"Here comes one!" exploded Laurie. "From the other side."
They watched. The shock wave converged, growing in amplitude as it
circled down to the pinpoint. There was a clouding at the focal point
where earth itself ground itself to bits in the grip of a transmitted
wave of energy. The receding wave spread out again.
[Illustration: _Fascinated, horror-stricken, Ackerman, Laurie Blaine,
and her father watched the Earth being consumed by atomic fire._]
Then, as though the enemy had been searching out their
target--bracketing it--other pinpricks burst in widely separated
places. The criss-crossing of concentric shock waves cast up high peaks
that raced along, tearing up the very ground.
"On earth," said Blaine, "Nine hours have passed since the initial
blast."
More time passed, and then with the target accurately bracketed, the
pinpricks of energy burst again and again and again in lightning
speed. The face of Terra sparkled; scintillated. The ground writhed
and boiled; mighty gouts of earth and tortured stone burst upward
where the bursts of power drove below the surface. The scintillating
face of the earth increased to a constant glow as the ferocity of the
attack increased. Moving clouds of gray and white obscured the surface,
through which came the angry, flaming glow of surface bombing by high,
sheer energy.
The color temperature of the cloud increased until the scintillating,
ever-changing illumination changed subtly. Now the smoky, cloudy earth
shone with an angry glow more bright than the individual sparkles; it
was like a fog-cloud illuminated from behind. "The earth," said Blaine
in an awesome voice, "is growing incandescent."
* * * * *
Ackerman took a deep breath. "And still," he sighed bitterly, "they
continue!"
"They will continue, until they raise the temperature of the earth
so high that the thermal energy is sufficient to exceed the escape
velocity of the earth's mass. Then, driven by the power of the
light-output, the earth will disperse in a cloud of streaming,
incandescent gas. For," Blaine added sardonically, "as the first
quantities start to leave, the mass diminishes and the escape velocity
diminishes also. The earth will expand in white-hot gas and disperse
forever."
"Horrible," said Les Ackerman through a dry and aching throat.