Futures Past (13 page)

  
"Oh God," he prayed, "make this turn out... right."

  
On the darkened eastern hemisphere a point of searing blue light—many times brighter than any that had gone before—flared suddenly. Within a second it grew to a blinding disc a hundred miles across that lit the whole of North Africa like a planet-sized floodlight. Then orange and purple and dirty brown clouds formed, hiding its centre and making it look like a giant, hazy-edged doughnut.

  
The fiery doughnut continued to expand, but it began to fade. The reaction wasn't self-sustaining after all.

  
Mitchell stumbled to a telescope, but he couldn't see a thing—his visor kept fogging up just at eye level. Vaguely he saw the lizard and the withered prune-thing scuttling and bouncing away in the direction of their ships; the cube, who had been wearing his, was gone already. The ending of the show had more than pleased them—their parting thoughts to him brought a tightness to his throat and made it even harder for him to see. Mitchell left the useless telescope and went to one of the receivers. Tears didn't affect one's hearing, luckily.

  
It was a shouting, screaming bedlam.

  
"Change in wind direction," roared one. "Dust warning for Malta and Italy as far north as Rome. Population will go underground for eighteen hours minimum. Take food and water, especially water...."

  
"Prenez-garde Marseilles et Lyon . . ." babbled another. "Achtung! Achtung! . . ." screamed somebody else. But at most of the stations they were just yelling their fool heads off.

  
Mitchell searched the dial feverishly until he got what he wanted.

  
". .. we are flying eight miles above the northwest coast of Africa, and can see the main cloud like a dull red fog drifting toward us from over the Sahara. Wind velocities, etc., have been calculated so that the main cloud will disperse harmlessly over the north Atlantic, but some of the ragged edges have become detached and are being blown toward Central Europe. Cities in the danger area are being warned to get the people into the shelters prepared for this contingency."

  
Happily; the voice continued; "The shock wave from the explosion point reached harmless proportions beyond a circle of 150 miles radius. There were no casualties, and there is now no danger of the multiple H-explosion starting a self-sustaining chain reaction in the Earth's crust.

  
"Operation Last Blast has been a complete success. Everything—chemical explosives, orthodox atomic weapons, the works—went up at once. Sick of war at last, the people of the Earth unanimously decided to disarm, so today we destroyed all our weapons of war, everywhere, and at almost the same time. There is not a bomb or gun left on the whole planet.

  
"The chemical explosives and simple A-weapons were disposed of harmlessly in specially evacuated areas of the countries concerned. But the Sahara blast was a different matter. As you know, the only way we could be sure of destroying our fantastically heat-resistant and utterly deadly bacteriological bombs—the BB17's—was to collect them all in one place and detonate a circle of H-bombs around them; no bacteria could live through the heat produced by that explosion. But setting off so many H-weapons all together was a terrible risk. There was a chance that the explosion would start a chain reaction in the Earth's crust that would blow the planet into very small pieces. We were lucky; it didn't.

  
"Now the people who came home from the Moon and planets to be present at the greatest and most dangerous moment in human history, the people who were unable to take our bombs into space because of the shock of takeoff, can go out again. They can go out with a new-found maturity and a sense of complete unity and conquer those planets. Eventually they will spread to the stars. We are a fighting race, but we no longer are a warlike one. There are plenty of natural forces in the universe to fight; we've now outgrown the urge to fight ourselves, or for that matter, any other intelligent and civilized species we might find out there among the stars.

  
"This is Bryce Paterson signing off and returning you to the studio...."

  
At the studio: sounds of shouting, cheering, laughing. A voice calling, "Shaddup dammit, we're on the air," and another asking, "But if we aren't going to make gunpowder anymore, what about the Fifth of November ... ?"

  
Mitchell began slowly storing away his record tapes and film spools. He wondered how long it would be before somebody down there remembered that he was up here.

  
THE blast ripped away the mouth of number six launching tube, together with a wide area of the ship's hull plating. Part of an underlying longeron torn free by the explosion —a twisted and ragged-edged I-beam fully twelve feet long—was blown downward into the wrecked tube. Narrowly missing an already primed warhead, and without noticeably slowing speed, it battered its way through the fusing servos and crashed into the control chamber. Like a gargantuan javelin it shot unerringly toward the nerve center of the room, an erect, metal ovoid that was the focus of a hundred brightly-colored cables. The control pod's protective screen checked the hurtling girder abruptly, but could not stop it until the damage had been done.

  
As the twisted mass of metal was flung heavily away by the twenty gravities repulsion of the screen, a thick, oily, shock-absorbent fluid bubbled from the wound it had made in the pod's side. That, and a little blood.

  
Captain Cross said, "Grayson."

  
What, Grayson thought tiredly, do you want me to do about it? Aloud, he said, "Yes, sir. I see it."

  
The destruction of number six, and the damage to the human-operated control pod showing on the captain's master screen was duplicated on his own panel, and as ship's medical officer he knew his duty. Send a nurse either to patch up or transfer the casualty to sick bay; simple. But the simple answer to this problem was impossible, Dr. Grayson knew as he looked helplessly at nine tiny, yellow lights burning at widely separate intervals on his control panel; there wasn't a nurse available to send.

  
Nine lights, burning yellow to indicate that all were currently engaged on cases, when there should have been eighty!

  
There had been eighty just half an hour ago, before the Starcloud met the three Raghman ships, but since then his lights had been steadily going out. Dr. Grayson tried to think of them as lights going out, and not as whole sections of the ship wrecked, cut off from control and communication, or just cut off; it was better for his mental efficiency if he did that. He found it very difficult to accept the fact that this, the invincible, indestructible, and a dozen more similar adjectives, super-battleship Starcloud was ninety percent wreckage, with the percentage increasing every minute. Judging by the stunned expressions on the faces of the three other officers in the control room, they were having the same difficulty.

  
No one had ever reported three ships acting together before; usually the Raghman globes operated singly. Grayson was sure that the Starcloud wouldn't live to report it either.

  
One of the lights on his panel—Nurse 53—flickered from yellow to white, indicating that the nurse had almost finished with the current case and would shortly be free for reassignment to another. Grayson forced the overall catastrophe out of his mind quickly, and narrowed its focus to concentrate solely on his job. Fifty-three was working fairly close to the wrecked number six, so it might be possible to help the casualty there after all. He bent forward and flipped the switch that would link the nurse's vision pickup with his main view-screen, and watched the treatment being completed.

  
The man had suffered fractures in both legs, damage to the lumbar vertebrae, and superficial lacerations on and around the affected areas. He was encased now in a sticky white cocoon from toes to chest, and as Grayson watched carefully, a needle drove into the crewman's arm, injecting antishock and a sedative, and withdrew again too fast for him to see it. A fine spray played briefly over the cast, hardening it, then Nurse 53's light turned green. Treatment concluded.

  
Using direct control and never taking his eyes off the viewer, Grayson took the nurse immediately into a corridor leading toward the damaged number six—Nurse 53 had the fault common to all mechanisms designed to do more than a few simple, specialized jobs—it was incredibly delicate. There might be obstacles in its path which the robot's built-in responses would not recognize as such, and there were too few nurses left for him to risk this one unnecessarily. He took a little of his attention from the control panel when Cross bent over him, but only briefly.

  
"Grayson," the captain said quietly, "if that man is alive, I want him brought directly to the control room."

  
Cross always spoke quietly, and even at the height of the present battle he hadn't uttered a single unnecessary word. If there was a weak point in that tall, spare frame, it was microscopic, and a man would almost die rather than show weakness before him. During the engagement, when shouting and a certain degree of confusion would have been considered normal, he hadn't raised his voice once. And he was most economical with words. Grayson didn't expect an explanation for the completely unprecedented order.

  
"The man is Stuart," Cross said. "A drive engineer." He turned and began trying to coordinate the ship's four remaining fire points against the nearest, but incredibly agile, Raghman ship.

  
Why, Grayson asked himself, should a casualty be brought here instead of to sick bay? The fact that he was an overdrive engineer didn't explain anything, at first. But the answer came to him suddenly, and for the first time since joining the ship, Grayson felt a little ashamed of Captain Cross.

  
The Starcloud carried lifeships, simple, reaction-driven shells that had neither the speed nor fuel-food storage capacity for instellar flight—but for one exception. Nearby, under a section of the hull as yet untouched by the Raghman force eddies, was a six-man lifeship equipped with the overdrive generators which made speeds greater than light possible. Nobody in the control room, Grayson knew, had the necessary specialized knowledge to tune and operate those generators, hence the captain's order to bring Engineer-Gunnery Officer Stuart here.

  
Cross was going to abandon ship.

  
Sometimes, Grayson told himself angrily, he thought like some dewy-eyed twelve-year-old. Captain Cross was the most valuable and highly skilled scientist on the ship, otherwise he wouldn't have been its captain. The romantic tradition that masters should perish with their commands had always been a stupid one, and in this present era it was downright criminal. Cross was duty-bound to save himself first, not last. Grayson knew this, but somehow, he still felt disappointed in the other. . . .

  
The control room seemed to jump as a shock wave passed through it: another force-eddy had successfully penetrated the ship's defensive screen. Grayson bent forward anxiously. The picture being transmitted from Nurse 53 spun wildly as the nearby explosion sent the robot tumbling end over end. He sighed thankfully when the image steadied again and his panel told him that 53 was undamaged. But his relief was short-lived, because the clear, steady picture on his view-screen showed a section of the corridor along which the robot was passing. The farther end of the corridor—terminating in the control chamber of number six launching tube—had turned brown and was slowly caving in. The force-eddy had been very close indeed.

  
"Get it through! Quickly!" Cross was behind him again, his voice shockingly loud and harsh. "Maybe you can bring it back by a different route...."

  
"I'm trying," Grayson interrupted, "but it's going to be a tight squeeze. . . ." He didn't have to tell the Captain that the squeeze would need to be a very loose one if the robot was to be of any use when it did get through. Nurse 53 was no bulldozer.

  
It was like living through one of those nightmares where everything is slowed to quarter speed. Slowly, as the robot's vision pickup relayed it back, the image of the damaged end of the corridor expanded in Grayson's view-screen. Almost imperceptibly, yet far too quickly for the robot's safety, the ceiling and walls slumped and buckled under their own weight. As if the metal plating and bulkheads had been turned into so much soft, brown toffee, the ceiling rippled and bellied downwards and the walls tried to emulate a concertina. The secondary—softening —effect of the force-eddies produced no heat, but they were deadly enough without it.