_Out of a future too dimly discerned
to be comprehensible one was chosen.
Why--no one knew or could know._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Comet March 41.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Slowly, wearily, the yellow sun went down the sky. From the east the
night came on, as dark and as deep as the night that has no ending.
The last rays of the sun washed down over the planet, over the low
rounded hills and the trees that grew on them, through the shallow
valleys where the grass grew rank and luxurious. The last songs of
the birds came undisturbed through the dusk. A deer snorted. From
somewhere came the bark of another animal, a bark that ended in a howl,
long-drawn and mournful.
Dawn world or dusk world?
The night flowed into the valleys, filled them with a mystic darkness.
The darkness crept to the tops of the low hills. Slowly it crept around
a huge ball that rested on top of the nearer hill. The ball, perhaps
fifty feet in diameter, lifted a foot from the ground. It quivered,
lifted two feet, then slowly settled back to earth.
The darkness came in around it, touched it, hid it from sight.
* * * * *
Lee Garth twisted in his chair. Wearily he laid the pencil down.
The equations wouldn't work right. They kept trying to run off into
impossible combinations. There was an erratic but persistent gadfly of
thought buzzing in his mind, a vague shadowy movement in his brain.
Like a ghost from shadow-land it twisted through his brain, twisting
through the dark convolutions where his memory lay testing the open
synapses, seeking a place where a short circuit would result in action.
Fretfully, Lee Garth picked up the pencil. But there was a thinking in
his mind, a formless thinking that was somehow purposeful. He sensed
the import of that purpose. Tiny chills ran over his body, tiny rivers
of icy cold. His fingers trembled. The pencil moved over the page.
Garth was first puzzled, then perturbed, then lost in a vast unease.
* * * * *
Here and there upon this earth are fields where men, looking backward,
see how the stream of history shifted.
There is a field in Greece.
* * * * *
Xerxes gave his orders to his captains. He waited while his host was
led forth. Footmen, archers, men with slings. The cavalry would not
be of value, for the barbarians, up there, were in a narrow mountain
pass. It did not matter. The light-armed troops were more than capable
of dispelling these wild tribesmen. By noon, or the middle of the
afternoon, the way would be clear to the peninsula beyond. Thus
reasoned Xerxes.
When the night came the barbarians were still holding. Tomorrow, Xerxes
thought, his troops would be victorious.
Tomorrow came and fresh troops went forth. And eventually the news
came back to where Xerxes waited that his army had been routed and was
fleeing in disorder.
It was fate, Xerxes perhaps decided. Fate was a chancy thing. No man
could know for certain what the morrow would bring. Tomorrow was a dark
reality and the paths to the future were uncertain and tortuous.
But if Xerxes had ravaged the peninsula of Greece in 480 B.C. in all
probability Plato would not have been born in 427, and he would not
have had as his pupil a youth named Aristotle, and the thinking of
the scientists of twenty-five coming centuries would have lacked the
guidance of these two men. Into the dark reality of the future the
human race would have followed other paths and the man-world of 1940
would not have come into being.
There is a pass in Greece called Thermopylae.
* * * * *
Lee Garth watched, his eyes following the pencil. Cold winds seemed
to blow on him. They blew colder each time he realized he was not
dictating what the pencil was writing. He watched the factors appear
on the paper. There was a meaning in those symbols, a meaning and a
purpose stretching across the long, long gulfs of time, reaching from
the amoeba, in the protoplasmic slime of steaming seas that are long
gone, forward to the creature that shall emerge in some other era, in
some century of the far future.
Through him the meaning ran, through Lee Garth, who was 37 years old in
1940.
* * * * *
There is a field in France.
The far-flung southern horn of the Saracen crescent, sweeping northward
in its history changing flight, found the field in France where Charles
Martel--Charles the Hammer--waited. With keen sword, and long lance,
and hissing arrow, all day long the armies battled, and when the night
came on, the Saracen host, smashed and bleeding under the blows of the
Hammer, reeled backward, fled back out of France. To the Saracens,
tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, was the backward turning road. The
glowing sun of Islam flickered, and never again burned so brightly.
There was a shift in history, and another world evolved because of
Charles Martel.
There is a field in France called Tours.
Lee Garth mopped the perspiration from his forehead. He stopped writing
for a moment, pushed back his thinning hair, pulled a cigarette from
the package on his desk, struck a match. The smoke was blue and
indistinct in that shadowed room. Far off, from another world it
seemed, there came the raucous hoot of an automobile horn. Somebody
going home, or going to work, or going somewhere but probably going
home, since the hour was so late. Didn't matter.
There was a gadfly buzzing in his brain.
Again the pencil raced over the paper.
* * * * *
Jan Lippershey's children played in his yard, and now and again, when
he would let them, they played in the shop where he worked. They liked
to play with the things he made. Lenses, convex and concave. The
children played with the lenses, and the telescope was born. Now men
could see farther.
That happened in Holland, early in the 1600s.
Perhaps it was more important than Thermopylae or Tours.
Men looked at the stars. World on world on world--world without end--as
far as the first telescope showed, the dance of the suns went on. Men
made bigger lenses. Beyond those limits the suns were to be found. Did
space go on forever? Bigger lenses, bigger lenses.
But still men could not see into tomorrow. It was a formless void of
unreality and no instrument could penetrate it. Men had to go blindly
into tomorrow, fearing, hesitating, drawing back, until they were
kicked there by relentless time.
In 1940 men worked on a lens 200 inches in diameter.
* * * * *
In 1940, all through a sleepless night, Lee Garth watched his racing
pencil write factor after factor, watched the equations grow from page
to page. Still the pencil raced. He watched it.
He did not think of Leonidas, who had withstood Xerxes, or of Charles
Martel, or of Jan Lippershey, or any of the thousands of others
who have warped the course of human destiny--Kepler, Newton, Watt,
Einstein, Galileo, Copernicus, the little corporal who went down to
Saint Helena. He did not even think of Lee Garth. For that night Lee
Garth did not matter to himself. Nor ever again.
The dawn came in through the windows of the old house where he worked.
Softly, quietly, silently, the night went and the day came. Another
tomorrow became today, another dark reality lifted out of the formless
void of the future.
* * * * *
George McNeil, Scot production foreman in charge of the cable
manufacturing department on United Electric's vast plant, stared at the
order that had come down to him. His face a wrinkled frown, he studied
the blue prints.
"Those domned monkeys with their domned slip-sticks," he grunted,
referring to the drafting department, "have made another mistake."
Specification sheets in hands, he stalked out of his cubby-hole and
headed for the office of the production manager.
The production manager examined the specifications. He called the head
of the drafting department on the office phone and got a short answer
for his trouble.
"The specifications are right," he said testily to McNeil. "Go ahead
and fabricate them."
"I can build the domned things," McNeil retorted. "But I'll sweat in
hell if I see any use for them. Solid copper bus-bars twenty-four
inches in diameter! We don't build a generator--and neither does
anybody else in the world--that needs such cables to carry the current
it produces."
"They're just part of a big order that came down from the front office
marked 'Rush'," the production manager answered. "But they do seem out
of reason--" His forehead wrinkled into a frown. He hesitated. "But
an order is an order. Build them. What the customer wants with them is
his business."
When McNeil left the office the production manager was still frowning.
Twenty-four inch cables--. He scratched his head, as if to stir to life
a sluggish idea. Then he got up, walked through the plant, up to the
general offices, and the girl in the beautifully finished reception
room said Mr. Tompkins would see him in a minute.
"The point I make is this," the production manager said to Mr.
Tompkins, "if anybody is building a generator that requires cables of
that size, we had better know about that generator."
Tompkins didn't show any emotion. He was a heavy man, not from fat but
from muscle. Strength. He had to have strength to hold down his job as
general manager. His eyes narrowed slightly and a tiny glow appeared in
them.
"A fellow by the name of Garth placed that order," Tompkins said.
"Garth? Garth? Where have I heard that name before? Umph!" He
remembered the presence of his subordinate. "Thank you. You may go."
The production manager went.