The Day After Doomsday Read online

  They didn’t notice him, where he stopped by the door. Ramri had taken over the main pilot chair, a convertible one adjusted to his build. Captain Strathey and Goldspring the detector officer—apparently recovered from the initial shock—flanked him. Bowman stood near the middle of the room, prepared to go where needed.

  A good bunch of boys, Donnan thought. A threat to their lives was the best therapy in this moment that anyone could have offered them.

  His eyes searched the ports.

  Earth had already shrunk to view, the horror was not visible, but the cool blue-green color he remembered from three years ago was now grayish white, sunlight reflected off stormclouds. Luna hung near, a pearl, unchanged and unchangeable. Off to one side, its radiance stopped down by the screen, the sun disc burned within outspread wings of zodiacal light. And beyond and around lay space, totally black, totally immense, bestrewn with a million wintry stars.

  He realized with a shudder how little difference Ragnarok had made.

  But where were the missiles? Goldspring, hunched over his instruments, was sensing them by radar and nuclear emission and the paragravitic pulses of their engines. They should have approached faster than this. The lumbering Franklin could not possibly out-accelerate a boat whose only payload was a hydrogen warhead.

  “Yes, three, I make it,” Goldspring said tonelessly. “When can we go into superlight?”

  “Not soon,” Ramri answered. “The nearest interference fringe must be several A.U. from here.” He didn’t need to calculate with the long formulas involved; a glance at Sol, an estimate of fluctuation periods, and he knew. “I suggest we—yes—”

  “Don’t suggest,” said Strathey tightly. “Order.”

  “Very well, friend.” The Monwaingi voice sang a string of figures. Three-fingered hands danced over the keyboard. A set of specialized computers flashed the numbers he asked for. He threw a strong vector on the ship’s path and, at the proper instant, released a torpedo broadside with the proper velocities.

  DONNAN sensed nothing except the shift in star views: until a small, brilliant spark flared and died sternward. “By the Lord Harry, we got one!” Goldspring exclaimed.

  We shouldn’t have, Donnan thought. Space missiles should be able to dodge better than that!

  The ship thrummed. “I believe our chance of hitting the other two will improve if we let them come nearer,” Ramri said. “They are now on a course only five degrees off our own; relative acceleration is low.”

  “How did they detect us, anyway?” Bowman asked.

  “The same way we detected them,” Goldspring answered. “Kept instruments wide open. Only they are set to home on any ship they spot.”

  “Sure, sure. I just wondered . . . I was off the bridge for a while . . . Was radio silence broken? Or—” Bowman wiped his brow. It glittered with sweat, under the cold fluorescent panels.

  “Certainly not!” Strathey clipped.

  An idea nudged Donan. He cleared his throat and stepped forward. The exec gaped at him, but left Strathey to roar: “What are you doing here? I’ll have you in irons for this!”

  “Had a notion, sir,” Donnan told him. “Here we have a chance to learn something. And at no extra risk, since we’ve already been spotted.”

  The captain’s face writhed. Red and white chased each other across his cheeks. Then something seemed to drain from him. He slumped in his chair and muttered, “What is it?”

  “Throw ’em a radio signal and see if they respond.”

  “They’re not boats with crews aboard,” Goldspring protested. “Our receivers have been kept open. Boats would have called us.”

  “Sure, sure. I was just wondering if those critters were set to home on radio as well as mass and engine radiation.”

  Goldspring looked hard at Donnan. The detector officer was a tall man, barely on the plump side, with bearded fleshy features that had been good-humored. Now his eyes stared from black circles. He had had a family too, on Earth.

  Suddenly, decisively, he touched the transmitter controls. The blips on his radar screen, the needles on other detection instruments, and the three-dimensional graph in the data summary box, all wavered before firming again. Donnan, who had come close to watch, nodded. “Yep,” he said. “Thought so.”

  Given the additional stimulus of a radio signal, the blind idiot brains guiding the missiles had reacted. So powerful were the engines driving those weapons that the reaction had showed as a detectable slight change of path, even at these velocities. Then the missile computers decided that the radio source was identical with the object which they were attacking, and resumed pursuit.

  “YES,” Ramri said gravely, “they are programmed to destroy communicators as well as ships. In a word, anything and everything in this neighborhood that does not give them a certain signal . . . Stand by! Fire Nine, Eight, Seven on countdown.” He rattled off coordinates and accelerations. Elsewhere in the ship, the torpedomen adjusted their weapons, a task too intricate to be handled directly from the bridge. “Five, four, three, two, one, zero!”

  The torps sprang forth. At once Ramri hauled back on his controls. Even a paragrav craft could not maneuver like an airplane, but he did his best, cramming force into an orthogonal vector until Donnan heard an abused framework groan. Flame bloomed, not a hundred miles away. The screens went temporarily black at that monstrous overload.

  As they returned to life, the third missile passed within yards.

  There was time for men to glimpse the lean shape, time even for Strathey to press a camera button. Then it had vanished. Donnan exhaled in a gust. That had been too close for comfort.

  He stared at the dispersing gas cloud where the torpedoes had nailed the second missile. The incandescent wisp was quickly gulped by surrounding darkness. Goldspring nodded at his instruments. “Number Three’ll be back shortly, when it’s braked the speed it’s got.”

  “I’m surprised it didn’t come closer,” Donnan remarked. Keep this impersonal, he thought, keep it a problem in ballistics, don’t imagine the consequences if that thing zeroes in on us. No use thinking about those consequences, anyway. You’d never feel them.

  “I am also,” Ramri declared. “I was not overly hopeful of our escaping. This ship is not designed for combat. Whoever programmed those missiles did a poor job of it. They should have murdered us.”

  “Did a good enough job on Earth,” Bowman grated.

  “Shut up!” Strathey almost yelled.

  “Stand by.” Ramri’s orders trilled forth. A final time, nuclei burst in space . . . so close that Donnan felt the gases buffet the Franklin, like a shock through his feet and into his bones, a clang and rattle that slowly toned away.

  “WHEW!” He shook his head, trying to clear it.

  “How much radiation did we get that time?” Strathey asked.

  “Does that matter?” Bowman replied, high-pitched and with a giggle. “We’re none of us married.”

  Goldspring jerked in his seat. His eyes closed and he gripped the chair arms till his knuckles whitened. The viewscreen crowned his head with stars.

  “Be quiet.” Strathey’s nostrils twitched. “Be quiet or I’ll kill you.”

  “I’m s-sorry,” Bowman stuttered. “I only—I mean—”

  “Be quiet, I said!”

  Goldspring relaxed like a sack of meal. “Forget it,” he mumbled. “Not enough radiation to matter. The force screens can block a lot more than that.” He went to work resetting his detectors.

  Ramri extended one thin hand.

  “Let me see the pictures you took, if your pleasure be so,” he requested. Strathey didn’t seem to hear. Donnan brought the self-developing film out. One frame was pretty clear, even showing details of the missile’s drive coils.

  Ramri stared at it a long while. The stillness grew and grew.

  “Recognize the make?” Donnan inquired at last.

  “Yes,” Ramri breathed. “I believe so.” He mumbled something in his own language. “Even of them,�
�� he added, “I hate to believe this.”

  “Kandemir?”

  “Yes. A Kandemirian Mark IV Quester. I have inspected some that were obtained by the Monwaingi intelligence service. They are standard anti-ship missiles.”

  “Kandemir,” Strathey whispered. “My God—”

  “Wait a bit, skipper,” Donnan urged. “Let’s not jump to conclusions.”

  “But—”

  “Look, sir, everything I’ve read and heard suggests to me that those missiles ought to have wiped us out. They should’a dodged everything we could throw at them and hit us broadside on. We aren’t a warship! Our armament was for swank, and because the Pentagon insisted a ship headed into unknown parts of the Galaxy should have some weapons. Ramri, you were puzzled too, weren’t you, by our escape?”

  “What is your meaning, Carl-my-friend?” The troubled golden eyes searched Donnan’s whole posture.

  The engineer shrugged. “Mainly I’d like to forestall any notion you guys may have gotten about heading straight for Kandemir and doing a kamikaze dive onto their main city.”

  “They don’t have a main city.” Bowman giggled again.

  GOLDSPRING glanced about.

  “I’ve just spotted several more objects approaching,” he said. “They’re still at the limits of detection, so I can’t positively identify their type. But what else would they be except missiles?” Donnan nodded. “The whole Solar System must be lousy with missiles in orbit.”

  “We cannot linger here, then,” Ramri said. “To a certain extent, only a fortunate concatenation of initial vectors allowed us to stand off the first three, poorly self-guided though they were. The second attack, or the third, will surely destroy us.” He considered the instrument readings. “However, we should certainly be able to reach the nearest interference fringe ahead of that flock. Once we go superlight, we will be safe.” From everything except ourselves, Donnan thought.

  “Get going, then,” Strathey rapped.

  Ramri busied himself with computation and thereafter with piloting. The humans eased a trifle, lit cigarettes, worked arms and legs to get some of the tension out. They were all shockingly haggard, Donnan observed. He wondered if he looked as corpse-like. But they were able to talk rationally.

  “Did Kunz find what happened to our artificial Earth satellites?” he asked. “The observatories and moon relays and so on?”

  “Gone,” Strathey said. He gagged. “Also the Moon bases. A new crater where each base had been.”

  “Yeh, I reckon we had to expect that.” Donnan sighed. McGee, assistant powerman at U.S.A.-Tycho, had been a particular friend of his. He remembered one evening when they got drunk and composed The Ballad of Superintendent Ball, whose scurrilous verses were presently being sung throughout the space service. And now McGee and Ball were both dead, and Donnan was signed on the Flying Dutchman. Well-a-day.

  “KUNZ and I tried to detect any trace of life,” Goldspring said. “Not human . . . no such hope . . . but a ship or a base or anything of the enemy’s—even an animal . . .” His words faded out.

  “No luck, eh? Wouldn’t’ve expected it, myself,” Donnan said. “Whoever murdered Earth had no reason to hang around. He’ll let his missiles destroy anyone who comes snooping. Later on, at his leisure, he can come back here himself and do whatever he figures on.”

  Ramri turned around long enough to say harshly, “He would not wish his identity known. I tell you, no one has committed such an atrocity before. The whole Galaxy will rise to crush Kandemir.”

  “If Kandemir is guilty,” Donnan said. His shoulders slumped. “Anyhow, the whole Galaxy will do no such thing. The whole Galaxy will never hear about this incident. A few dozen planets in our local spiral arm may be shocked—but I wonder if they’ll take action. What’s Earth to them?”

  “If nothing else,” Ramri said, “they will wish to prevent any such thing being done to their own selves.”

  “How was it done, do you think?” Bowman asked wearily.

  “Several multi-gigaton disruption bombs, fired simultaneously, would serve.” Ramri’s tone was the bleakest sound Donnan had ever heard. “The operation would require a small task force—each bomb is the size of a respectable asteroid—but still, the undertaking was not too big to be clandestine. The energy of the bombs would be released primarily as shock waves in crust and mantle, which in turn would become heat. There would be little residual radioactivity . . . No, I beg you, I cannot talk further of this at present.” As he faced back to the pilot board, he began keening, very low.

  After a while Captain Strathey said, “We had better proceed to some habitable planet of a nearby star, such as Tau Ceti II. Any other surviving ships can join us there.”

  “How’d they know where to look?” Donnan asked. “There are hundreds of possibilities within easy range. And besides, for all they know, we’ll’ve hightailed to the opposite end of the Galaxy.”

  “True. I thought at first we could pick some definite star to go to and place a radio transmitter, broadcasting a recording of our whereabouts, in orbit around Earth. Now that’s obviously ruled out. Even if we could stop to make such a satellite, the missiles would destroy it.”

  “They’ll also endanger any ship which returns here,” Goldspring pointed out. “Our escape was indeed partly luck. The next people might not be so fortunate. We’ve got to do more than get word to the others where to find us. We’ve got to warn them not to return to the Solar System in the first place.”

  “ARE there any others?” Bowman cried. “Maybe they’ve all come back and been wiped out. Maybe we’re the last humans alive—” He clamped his jaws. His fingers twisted together.

  “Maybe,” said Donnan. “However, don’t forget that several expeditions were a-planning at the time we left. We and the Russians had completed our big ships first, but China and the British Commonwealth had almost finished theirs and the Europeans expected to do so within another year. Of course, we don’t know where any of ’em went. The Russkies and Chinese wouldn’t say a meaningful word; the British and Europeans still hadn’t made up their minds. And then some other countries like India might have gone ahead and started spacing too, that weren’t figuring on it three years back. Sure, perhaps everybody else made short hops and got home before us and died with Earth. But I sort of doubt that. Humans had already visited a good deal of the local territory, as passengers on other planets’ ships. There’d be small glory in repeating such a trip. Better go some place new.”

  Like us, he thought, running headlong toward Sagittarius and the star clouds at galactic center.

  Doubtless we weren’t the first. Among the millions of spacefaring races, we can’t have been the first to look at the Galaxy’s heart, and curve up to look at the entire beautiful sight, and gather enough data to keep our scientists happy for the next hundred years. But none of our neighbor peoples had done so, even though they had spaceships before we did. They aren’t that kind. They accepted space travel when it came to them, and traded and discovered and had adventures, and in the course of time they’d have gotten around to stunts like ours. But man had to go look first of all for God. And fail, naturally. Man is a nut from way back. The Galaxy will miss a lot of fun, now he’s gone.

  He is not. I say he is not.

  “Assume other Terrestrial ships are kicking around, then,” Goldspring said with a humorless chuckle. “Assume, even, that they come home like us and escape again like us. Have we any idea where they will go?”

  “Local, habitable planets,” Strathey said. “That makes sense.”

  “Uh-uh.” Donnan shook his head. “How do you know the enemy isn’t there too? Or, at least, won’t come hunting there for just such remnants as us?”

  THE idea rammed home and they stared at each other. Donnan went on: “Anyhow, we know already, from information given us by nonhumans and from expeditions of our own on chartered foreign ships . . . we know that the nearest terrestroid planets are pretty miserable places. At best you’ll find yo
urself in a jungle, with gibbering stone-age natives for company. We aren’t set up for that. Three hundred men would be so busy surviving they wouldn’t have time to think.”

  “What do you propose instead?” None thought it strange that Strathey should ask the „ question.

  “Well, I’d say go beyond this immediate vicinity, on to someplace civilized. Someplace with decent climate. Most especially, someplace where facilities are available. Why be second-rate Robinson Crusoes when we are first-rate technicians . . . and can get good jobs on the strength of that? Also, we’ll be in a better position to hear any news of other ships like ours.”

  “Y-yes. Quite correct. I do think we should stop at Tau Ceti, perhaps one or two other local stars, and leave radio satellites. I admit the sheer number of such stars makes it improbable that any other survivors will come upon our message, but the time and effort we lose making the attempt will not be great. Thereafter, though . . . yes, I agree. One of the clusters of civilization, where numerous planets practice space travel.”

  “Which one?” Goldspring asked. “I’ve seen the estimate that there are a million such in the entire Galaxy.”

  “Our own, of course,” Ramri said over his shoulder. “The cluster of Monwaing and its colonies, Vorlak, Yann, Xo—”

  “And Kandemir,” Strathey reminded.

  “Not to Kandemir, certainly,” Ramri said. “But you must go to a Monwaingi world. Where else? You will be made welcome in any of our cultures. My own Tanthai on Katkinu in particular. But Monwaing itself would also—”

  “No,” Bowman interrupted. “What?” Ramri blinked at him. The throat pouch quivered.

  “No,” repeated Bowman. “Not Monwaing or its colonies. Not till we know Monwaing isn’t the one that destroyed Earth!”

  III

  The horror of the human condition—any human condition—is that one soon grows used to it.

  —Sanders

  TAU CETI II was no place for a stroll. Safe enough, but there was nothing to see except a few thornplants straggling across rusty dunes, under a glaring reddish sun. The air was hot and dry and so charged with carbon dioxide that it felt perpetually stuffy. This was in the subarctic Camp Jeffers region, of course, explored by Australians in a chartered Vorlakka ship ten years ago.