The meaning of my act enveloped me in a mist of fear. I trembled
violently. Sweat beaded on my face and smarted in my eyes.
Had I been right in my choice? Had Draken been correct in his analysis,
and had I been justified in jumping to such an empirical conclusion
without more conclusive proof? Had all these nameless slaves of decay
been victims of the delusion from which I had freed them? Or had I been
deluded by the lies of a fanatic?
I looked down and saw my hand reaching for the lever to move it back.
It was an unconscious gesture motivated by vague fears. I seemed such a
little man to destroy a world.
What was happening to all animated puppets of this future society now
that its mechanical contrivances had been destroyed? What had happened,
even back in my own time, in large cities, when only the electric
systems had been blown up, or the water mains, or gas mains? What
mind-numbing chaos and madness must be developing around me as I stood
inside the heart of a world which I had torn loose from its arteries.
Jokan led me from the room and onto a balcony. Somehow I had thought
myself down far in the bowels of this World-City. But as I stepped out,
clouds were on a level with my eyes, synthetic clouds, and wind slapped
my face. We looked down.
Blind in that room with only my imaginative thoughts, the vastness
of my act had been a conceivable thing. Here, looking over the
true vastness, an endlessness, I found my brain whirling, refusing
to consider what was really happening. In a monody of sadness and
fatalism, Jokan recited the meaning to me, as she watched her world
crumble.
A sound surged up and about me. A low murmuring that grew and expanded
into a vibrating roar. To my right, far away, I saw a massive steely
structure explode into a billion fragments and a blinding flash of
power carried to my ears a splitting roar. It began happening all over,
through the tiers and levels and towering heights of the World-City, as
far on any side I looked, as far as I could see.
I cringed. Below, a sea of blind ants scurried madly about in infantile
terror. Flying boats crashed as their automatic pilots stopped
functioning. All the power of the city had ceased. The smoothly working
machinery had become an onrushing nemesis of destruction, each stride
feeding on the preceding flaw in function or the complete lack of any
function.
Huge structures, power-hung, dropped their millions of tons of weight
onto hordes of milling humans who had no idea what was happening--if
they had ever known.
Gravity neutralizing units died and whole tiers collapsed. Unlimited
power from the harnessing of liquid oxygen reversed into a destructive
titan; a wave of overpowering heat rose up in a choking mist. Then the
building on which we stood began to tremble.
I turned. The bobbing sphere of escape was between Jokan and I, a
small supremely compact unit of atomic power, perhaps, conducting its
own motivation. "Why doesn't it stop, too?" I asked, as people ask
ambiguous questions in a crisis.
"It responds to the human mind alone," she said. "We have progressed
far in physiogenics, too, as well as in the mechanical sciences.
Perhaps it is the real world after all. We can go far beyond the
machines."
"We'd better go someplace--fast," I said shakily, for the building
lurched sickeningly, and I toppled back against the wall. The colonnade
buckled in front of me, but Jokan wasn't afraid. She kept looking over
the World-City.
I stumbled toward her. The heat was intensifying, becoming intolerable.
I clutched at her frantically. "You are going with me," I shouted. I
doubt if she heard me. "I love you," I yelled into her ear. "Don't you
understand?" She heard that. Her lips smiled thinly. Pain altered her
face like a plastic mask.
I felt the gigantic power of the sphere then as before. It began to
glow and oscillate and expand. And it sucked me into its limitless
depths and cosmological labyrinths as before. I felt the melting and
flowing and the indescribable twisted warping of sanity....
* * * * *
Jokan, working at my side, has done much to conquer the evil virus
of the Spartan menace. Her scientific knowledge, and her telepathic
acumen, place her above many of our greatest minds. This is enhanced by
an almost fanatical desire to destroy those who would destroy social
progress. Her faithfulness to duty is legendary.
We love each other with ties no one can understand who hesitate to
conceive of bonds extending through dimensions of space and time. She
never leaves my side in the unceasing night and day, crusading against
the Fascistic disease that is being stamped out, though painfully and
with aching slowness, that has extended over six centuries.
But between us there is an uneasiness. Sometimes this uneasiness finds
expression in little episodes--like the conversation at the last
meeting of the International Agencies in Casablanca. We were having
drinks before going into the Presidium.
Jokan was lovely--that's a dismal understatement--in a low cut evening
gown of plasti-silk. Her eyes were half closed.
"Will we ever win?" she said over the brim of a Tom Collins, which is
still the world's favorite cocktail.
"Yes," I said. Then I turned casually, though I didn't feel casual at
all. I knew what she was thinking.
"You must be the greatest optimist of all time," she said. "And I'll
help you and myself and all of us stay that way. I'll never mention it
again. Perhaps we can both forget."
"Try to forget what?" I said, though I knew well enough.
Her eyes fixed mine as only her eyes can. "Forget that the great world
we're fighting so hard to build we will be destroying a million years
from tonight."