by Eric Frank Russell
Here is a little known Eric Frank Russell story which we feel is more than worth bringing to the notice of readers. Vintage Russell at his best, in fact
* * * *
Through the foreport the vault of the night could be seen with its vivid scattering of stars, the cross-hairs being lined on a minor orb dead ahead. Yes, a minor orb, small, red, of little importance relative to the mighty host around and beyond it.
From end to end of space gleamed the mighty concourse of suns—blue, white, golden and cherry-coloured. Some were giants burning in colossal solitude. Others huddled in groups like fiery families. Many were more gregarious, naming in close-packed ranks to fling sparkling curtains across the dark, or form glowing clouds of inconceivable dimensions, or rotate themselves in mass to create titanic swirls beyond which lay others and again still more.
Amid all this, one small red sun burning modestly as if overawed by the vastness around it—maidenly shy and conscious of its own insignificance. But the cross-hairs on it selecting it for special attention, choosing it as the one true beloved from a myriad of greater beauties. There was reason for this special attention: its name was Sol—and that was almost another word for home.
The man behind the cross-hairs, keeping the tiny ship steady on its drive, was called Arthur Jerrold, a pilot-engineer by profession, a near-suicide by choice. His light grey eyes contrasted with his pure white hair. His features were a mass of fine lines, a living map of where he’d been. He was thirty years old, also two thousand and thirty years old.
It was that latter fact that filled him with anxiety and a good deal of nostalgia as he looked at the sun called Sol. Three years ago he had hurtled outward, leaving it behind his tail, deserting it as one throws away his heart when others beckon more enticingly. Now he was coming back, and Sol was some two thousand years older.
“Think carefully,” they had warned him, “lest later you are racked with vain regrets. Within that ship you will be in a tiny artificial universe of your own; you will be in your own space, your own peculiar time. There is no other way to reach so far.”
“I know.”
“Nor will you meet another of your kind in some strange far-off field. This is one of those experiments that are not repeated until we have weighed and estimated the results of the first.”
“Somebody has to do it first. I’m ready.”
“When you return—if ever you do return—the world you knew may be well-nigh unrecognizable. You will be a relic of its past. Perhaps none will remember you even by hearsay. All those you once held dear will be so long gone that their names will have vanished from the book of life, and their resting-places will be beyond anyone’s power to find. You will have been away two thousand years.”
“I’m ready, I tell you.”
So they had feted him and made much of him, and launched him amid a worldwide thunder of huzzahs. After that, he’d been on his own, just he and the ship, with Sol sinking and shrinking unseen behind the tail.
Now he was coming back. All he had to show for his Odyssey was his data on soundings of the great depths, a long, magnificent story of flaming orbs and whirling spheres, and the rise and fall of far-away civilizations and strange, almost incomprehensible barbarities.
Plus, of course, the countless seams on his face matched by the longitudinal scars on his ship. They were young and vigorous and full of intense vitality, he and the little ship; yet both were incredibly old, stamped with the mark of long years and great experiences.
Pluto was the outpost, that pointed down the starry lane. He swooped over it in a high arc and bulleted onward. Uranus was on the other side of Sol, and Neptune—far to his left; but Saturn was only slightly off his course, and Jupiter loomed almost straight in front. Maybe they were settled now, to what extent humans could settle them. Much can happen in twenty centuries.
For a moment he toyed with the notion of transferring the ship to normal time and making a swift circumnavigatory inspection of Saturn and Jupiter’s satellites. It would be good to see outcroppings of slanty roofs and tall towers that identified the haunting-places of mankind.
But he resisted the temptation. To jump out of his own superfast time-rate would delay things unbearably. In the neighbourhood of Mars would be the proper place to change over. He contented himself by curving over the big planets and again marvelled at the way in which temporal ratios made them appear to whirl and move at tremendous rates. Even after three years of it, he was still amazed that he could discern any features of space at all, much less distortedly; for one hour on the ship was roughly one month on Earth. So relatively fast did the sands of time run out in the exterior universe that his course for Sol described a fine curve which compensated for the system’s Vegadrift.
Jupiter swung grandly to the rear, it and its circling children seeming to move at some seven hundred times their accustomed velocities. The Asteroid Belt had similar acceleration, its multitude of rocks and midget worlds appearing elongated by the sheer rapidity of their passing. Then -Mars, the home world’s next-door neighbour, pink and shining, like a lightship telling the far voyager of coming landfall.
Here was the point of readjustment. Jerrold braced himself and flipped a knife-switch. A terrible blackness momentarily encompassed his mind; a fragmentary but powerful nausea seized his body. It was as if multi-million submicroscopic feet had stamped down hard to put the brakes on every vibrating molecule of his being. The effect was always the same, despite that he had used the switch times without number while scouting an army of distant suns. There was no getting hardened to it; one could only take the strain and wait for it to pass.
So it came, and tore at him, and went away, leaving him shaken but whole. Another line had been written upon his face. Another hair might have been whitened had it not already been silvery.
Now Mars was slowed to its old familiar pace. Its minutes were ship’s minutes, its hours ship’s hours. By contrast with former hugely zipped-up motions, the whole cosmos had suddenly become sedate. One could look forward and downward and see Phobos and Deimos circling the Red Planet like temple dancers rotating around a bland and silent god.
There were people on Mars that day two thousand years ago. Not many of them; just a small colony of metallurgists and mining engineers with their wives and families. A little redstone town with twenty streets, one oxygen plant and a widening ring of boreholes and quarries had formed their touch of Terrestrial civilization. They had called the place Lucansville after an aged, toothless nosey-poke who had first discovered osmiridium in the Plains of Whispering.
In that long-gone day when the ship gleamed fitfully overhead before switching on to the endless trail, the folk of Lucansville had fired a dozen gigantic star-rockets in his honour. Shooting balls and wavering streamers and wide cascades of brilliant green had illuminated the heavens for half a minute—and that had been man’s last farewell to man.
If the riches of Mars had held out, the boreholes reached new treasures, the quarries continued to surrender wealth, Lucansville might well be a metropolis by this time, a replica of the best that home had to offer. A place of wide avenues between splendid edifices. A city whose people could walk in pride, knowing their own mightiness.
He went down to see them.
They were not there.
The vessel went three times round, travelling low while grey eyes searched the landscape. From the Crown of the Snow King to the Crown of the Snow Queen, they were not there. From the Mountains of Desire to the Plains of Whispering, they were not there. Only the red earth, the blue-green lichens, the eastering dust-clouds and an eerie inward voice murmuring: “Nothing, nothing, nothing.”
Jerrold lifted the boat, pointed for Terra. He was both phlegmatic and hopeful. It had been so easy to expect too much of Mars despite that there had never been a lot to recommend it. Coldness, dust-devils, thin air and the need to carry oxygen flasks wherever one went. A brief whiff of reviving gas whenever the lungs became tired. A world of sniffers established to cope with odd, veins of rare metals good for only as long as they lasted, and likely to give out at any time. Lucansville had served its purpose, been abandoned and dissolved into the red dust. Once again Mars had lost its higher life and was left to float in the cosmic cold with its deserts, its dust and its mystery-pylons the origin of which no man knew. But Terra lay ahead.
It could be seen now as a thin white halo a fraction to one side of Sol. Near it, the smaller gleam of Luna. There was home. There was the world that had dreamed the ship, and planned it with clever brains, built it with cunning hands. There was the vital sphere that had provided the metals, the dielectrics, the instruments, the courage, determination, optimisms, the very life-form that was its pilot.
Both of them, man and vessel, strained eagerly forward as the target grew larger. Art Jerrold felt an overpowering urgency while his damp hands mastered the controls and his gaze remained fascinatedly upon the halo. The ship seemed to sense it also. The engine purred with delight; the wake-flame grew long, steady and brilliant; the control-responses were prompt and willing.
Luna dropped beneath, then fled sideways, crater-pitted and pale. Earth loomed up large, its continental outlines clearly defined as the ship sped round to the sunward side. Next, the vessel was skimming the fringes of atmosphere, dipping in, heating up, going out and dipping in again. This roller-coaster technique was the normal deceleratory process, providing neither the time nor the place for closer looks at the destination.
One and a half times round was sufficient. Velocity fell low enough to avoid a burn-up through thicker air. The boat went down, penetrating a thick layer of cloud and flattening out level with the expanse of whitecapped heaving sea.
This descent upon a world had been performed so often that Jerrold handled the controls subconsciously. He had done more of it than any man living, could swoop and draw close and examine a million square miles of terrain while the vessel seemed to fly itself in sentient co-operation. One could have a surfeit of worlds and—after the hundredth or two-hundredth—become cool, calculating, undisturbed, even somewhat lacking in the capacity for surprise.
But this was different. This was Terra. He had never felt so excited in his life.
The seas raced past. He kept wide-eyed watch ahead, fingers moist and nervous, queer little thrills running up and down his back. His mind was in turmoil.
Here there are no deadly dart-beetles, no strangler-trees, no wave-lattice life-forms like uncommunicative, uncomprehending ghosts, no searing sun, no host of maddening moons. Here the ship was made and I was born and a mighty audience cheered us on our way. Here lurked the little school in the woods, and the swimming-pool where Rudy stayed down seventy seconds and scared the wits out of us all.
A deep frown corrugated his forehead, and he chewed at his bottom lip. Of course, the school would not be here. Nor Rudy either. Joe and Jean and Mimi and little low-voiced Sue, they’d gone for keeps.
It’s hard to think they’re gone—but I got fair warning. Mustn’t think of such things. I’ve only myself to blame.
There will be plenty of other folk around, some of them remarkably like Rudy and Mimi and the rest. There will be other little schools and candy-shops and warm, clanging smithies where the sparks. By upward. Why the deuce do I think of things like those? I’m thirty. I’m grown up. Be your age, Jerrold!
All right: there will be bright little homes with windows shining in the dark. And woodland walks scented with pine-resin and herbs. I’ll make new friends and settle down. Somewhere there will be a girl waiting for me, though she doesn’t realize it, and I don’t either. We will know it only when we meet each other. Perhaps later on ...
Four tiny islands broke the monotony of ocean, rushed beneath, fled backward. He caught no more than the briefest glimpse of unbroken surfaces of treetops, ragged rings of silver beaches, outer rings of reefs and foaming breakers.
It would have been nice to land and breathe the air, pat the earth, smell the leaves, admire the flowers, whistle at the birds, shout and sing. A preliminary letting off of steam before the final sit-down.
Nice, but it could not be done. Not enough room. The slightest over-shoot would take him nose-first into a coral barrier or plunge him into the deeps.
More islands in a long string suggestive of an underlying mountain range. All jungle-covered, green and moist, with the eternal seas nibbling at their edges.
They came and went far too quickly for him to gloat over the possibility of seeing a palm-roofed village, an upturned face, a waving hand.
All he could see were splashes of colour, green surrounded by white and blue. Would there still be palm-roofed villages after two thousand years? Why not? At the time he went away, they had already existed through four thousand. Besides, in the most efficient and greatly developed world, they would preserve sanctuaries of simplicity.
Land and a great mountain! The ship gained altitude, engines humming, tubes drumming. Seas and trees and the big black mountain! Fiery-tailed, the vessel soared over a jagged peak, breaking into a cloud and coming out again.
It was not continental land; merely another and bigger island. Plenty large enough to have a main anchorage, a busy port and perhaps a dozen fishing villages.
No sign of active communities from what little he could see. At present velocity his minimum circle would have been radius of thirty miles: too great to permit a proper survey. The alternative was to reduce the circle by cutting down velocity, and he did want to do that.
A metropolitan centre of civilization was his goal, preferably one near to his original point of departure, near the places so long remembered though now forgotten by a world.
The eventual rise of a continental land-mass showed familiar outlines. Nearer, he became certain: it was the great wall of the Andes. There was a song in his heart as he let a side-tube blast, and the ship’s nose swung round to point north.
Seas and islands for hundreds of miles, and then a neck of land with a wide gulf beyond. At this point the first spasm of uneasiness came over him. Clearly defined by the noonday sun, the isthmus below was that of southern Mexico. He looked at it as he arrowed across, and the song inside him faltered and died away.
The hills were brown, the valleys green with thin glistening streaks showing where rivers wound down to the sea. But something was wrong; something was not as it had been two thousand years ago and still should be today.
He was already over the gulf when he identified the missing feature: there were no checkered patterns on the surface of the earth. A uniform green crept along the valleys, enjoying the shelter of the hills and the moisture of the streams. Nothing broke it up into variegated squares and oblongs. No walls, no fences, no irrigation systems, no contrast of differently coloured crops. No paths, no roads, no habitations of any kind. On the rim of the gulf should have stood the one-time city of Vera Cruz. It was gone, entirely gone.
At least, he thought it was gone. Lacking the navigational instruments of landbound vessels, Jerrold had to depend solely upon memory of past topography. He could be wrong—yet he remembered Vera Cruz with a wealth of detail. In the manner of his high-flying kind, he could picture it with fair accuracy, from above, as seen at a cloud-base.
Speed gave him little time to ponder that problem. He was across the gulf with the mainland rushing under the foreport just as his mind registered the worrying fact that he had seen no surface ships or air machines.
Land swept by. Bending forward, half out of his seat, he studied it anxiously. Miles of it, leagues of it, rolling by at tremendous pace. The ship went lower, so that it had to leap occasional hills, buttes and ridges. It jumped a mountain range, swung to follow a valley, traced a river to the sea, drummed across a harbour, over a headland and went back into deep country.
Like a hopelessly confused pigeon seeking the way to its loft, the boat scoured the territory in huge circles, zigzagged east-west and again north-south. At dusk it landed on a smooth plain, sliding towards the rim of the dying sun, cutting a long brown rut in the virgin green.
Jerrold came out and watched the sun go down without really seeing it. The feel of earth beneath his feet went unnoticed, completely devoid of its anticipated thrill. Neither did he perceive the waving grasses, the distant trees, the pink streamers in the sky. He was as one blinded by a vision of the impossible.
This was Terra, and yet not Terra, because there were no Terrans. Hereabouts, as nearly as he could tell, had been his launching-place, with seven towns just over the horizon, and a hundred roads radiating from them, and steel rails running from one to the other. Great stone towers and lattice masts and a spiderweb of power lines had marked the landscape, while countless air machines roared above. There had been fields of wheat and corn, barley and alfalfa, painting the scene in straight-edged jigsaw patterns.
Strong men in blue denims and women with sunbonnets had worked around here. You could stand and listen and hear for miles the sound of their voices, the clatter of their machines. Oaths and laughter—a voice calling to another across three fields. Smells of turned earth, warm crops, hot metal, engine oil and an occasional whiff of tobacco.
Now all were gone. The plain stretched undisturbed way back to the far hills. Grasses rustled in a breeze that bore no human sounds, no odours of life. Clouds drifted along with cold indifference. The sun went down at last, sucked away its streamers. Purple darkness encompassed the plain, the ship and the man—and there were no windows to light the way....
* * * *
With the morning Jerrold felt better. Lack of sleep encourages morbidity. Early to bed and long hours in the bunk made up in large part for what he had missed on the homeward trip. The sun smiled out of a clear blue sky. The grass was fresh with dew. Small birds chittered querulously outside the lock, urging him to get up and come out.
Emerging, he stretched his arms, combed his fingers through white hair. Thrilled anticipation came back, driving out remnants of disappointment and feelings of tragedy. After a meal he perked up enough to whistle a gay little tune as he walked around the ship and examined its outer condition.
The world is a big place; two thousand years is a considerable slice of history. Maybe they’ve discovered how to live without the bother of cultivating foodstuffs. Maybe they’ve reduced their numbers and clustered together some place else, enjoying companionship freed from the necessity of toil, independent of agriculture. Perhaps they’ve concentrated themselves in six, twelve or twenty super-cities, and are having one heck of a good time.
Satisfied that the boat stood in no need of repair, he went inside, closed the lock and went up in further search of his kind.
He headed first for New York—but there was no such place: only two rivers parted by a woody island. London, Paris, Belgrade, Madrid, Peking, Sydney, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, all were empty names that had become as if they had never been. All over the world the good earth had become the property of vegetation, insects, birds and small animals. Of men there were none.
Eight times round the ship went, and found not a house, not a human. But here and there, in places part shielded from eroding elements, were vague signs that men had been within the scheme of things. Here and there were traces as baffling as the mystery-pylons of Mars.
From a great altitude could be detected faint square shadows in the sands where once the Pyramids had stood. Slight, almost imaginary criss-crossings of discoloration in the grass marked the one-time sites of London and Des Moines. At twenty thousand feet Jerrold felt sure he could define the avenues and streets of Cincinnati.
Seven areas in the world were scarred by groups of gigantic craters, old and overgrown, quite without radioactivity. First views of these irresistibly suggested a bloody holocaust that might have wiped out a large portion of humanity. The sight of the last such place made him think again.
There a cluster of twenty-eight craters linked two rivers, formed a string of reservoirs and effectively drained a huge area of marshland. This made him go back for a second look at the others. They were the same. Manifestly, all had been blasted with calculating care designed to effect some big improvement to adjacent terrain.
On a sheltered cliff-face in the south of France he discovered what was left of a once deeply carved message now dissolved to near-invisibility. It could be seen and read only from a very flat angle when the morning sun’s rays struck across the surface.
Later, he found it again, in identical lettering, repeated in twelve places far distant from each other. Also more that looked as if they might have read the same had they not eroded beyond decipherability. He made a careful note of the message, warning, slogan or whatever it might be, intuitively feeling that once it had been displayed everywhere, without cease, all over the world.
It read: WAR Q!
Hope cannot live without nourishment. Raking a planet for what it has to offer was nothing new to Arthur Jerrold, but this time he was seeking his own. There were none to find, not one.
He made sure of this. He made doubly sure. He scoured the Earth from pole to pole, gave particular attention to remote hiding-places where possibly any remnants of a great disaster might yet linger, even sought evidence of flight underground. And after all that, he took the ship out to Luna, then to Venus, made another search of Mars and came back. A pathetic desperation had kept him going until in the end the flame of hope flickered and sank low.
Then and only then did he plant his little craft for keeps, and grimly review his own unique position.
The ship lay in a gentle valley where, so far as he could tell, the path had run down to the railroad crossing where he and Rudy and Sue had sat on the fence and waved at friendly engineers. That had been far back in memory’s misty dawn. Two thousand years ago!
Now humanity was no more. One could be certain of that. They could not have transferred themselves elsewhere, not three thousand millions of them. Such a mighty exodus would take far longer than he had been away, even if an immense armada could shift them at the rate of a million a year.
He sat on a smooth, tilted rock, his back to the vessel that had served so well, his white hair stirred by a warm breeze. The grey eyes that had kept calm and steady in the face of a thousand dangers were still calm, undefeated, but immeasurably sad.
Something had happened beyond imagining. What, he did not know, could not discover. There weren’t any clues, because it had occurred long, long ago; and the hand of time had obliterated causes and effects.
Or there was one possible clue, useless since it was untranslatable. Taking a slip of paper from his pocket, he pondered over the copy he had made.
WAR Q!
The only plausible guess he could suffer was that some line-up of circumstances had precipitated a series of major conflicts ending with humanity’s end. Possibly they had lettered the outbreaks alphabetically, the seventeenth one—Q; being the last. Maybe this was a slogan, part of the accompanying spate of propaganda to maintain the morale of people doomed to extinction.
He could not have been more wrong, but he was never to know it. Semantic modifications and linguistic changes over many centuries had turned him into a comparative illiterate, and he would never know that, either. The now-archaic language which he still used misled him hopelessly so that he could not recognize the clipped form and simplified spelling of the word BEWARE; neither could he identify a long-discarded capital letter as the stylized drawing of a hateful bacillus.
He could never know that humanity had left the stage of life non-explosively, more or less accidentally, and mostly as the unfortunate result of making something not theirs to create. Some experiments are for Man, some for Another.
So he sat on the stone, elbows on knees, chin on hand, lonely, sick at heart, bitter, resentful and yet strangely full of fight. Whatever had occurred, he decided, made no difference in the fact that he was the last man, the very last.
Ultimately there had to be a last man, anyway, but it could have happened more gloriously and at later date. It could have happened to someone changed beyond dreaming by countless millennia, so old that he was tired, content to sleep forever while the rest of humankind roamed among the stars. It need not have happened now, when the last man had come bearing gladsome news to a world that had always yearned for space.
His fists were tight, his knuckles white as he made decisions with grim disregard for the futility of battle.
All have gone but me. There are no others. But while I live, mankind still lives. I will build myself a rock house and give it a chimney. I will warm it with log fires, and the chimney will send smoke towards the skies, and the stars will peer down and know that Man still lives. There will be one home, one window glowing through the night, one garden worshipping the sun by day—because Man still lives.
Then, for the briefest moment, reaction set in, and he covered his eyes and murmured: “Oh, God! Oh, God!”
And when it had passed, he looked slowly along the grass and saw the mighty feet.
He could not gaze upward. If he had summoned every fibre of his being, he could not look up. The feet!
Nothing like these existed within two thousand years of space-travel. He knew that beyond doubt, for it was he of all men who had been to see. And he dared not let his eyes follow the feet upward to some colossal height and unbearable culmination. It would be more than human spirit could stand.
The feet could be sensed rather than seen. They stood before him, shapeless yet shaped, immaterial yet undeniably there, of no estimable size or proportions, compounded of the stuff of thought, and of mists and of faraway star-clouds. Their surfaces embodied multitudinous elusive, eye-twisting planes, almost as if while standing there they were simultaneously standing in a thousand other dimensions.
Jerrold had more than enough experience of lower, or equal or stupendously different life-forms to know when he was in the presence of a higher. The effect was hypnotic. The strength within him was not enough to save him from being paralysed by a mighty awe—though still he had no fear, no fear at all. Man is not afraid, not even the last man.
The little house. A chimney giving forth smoke. I am the last, but I will show them. I will tell the stars.
“Sleep!” came an order into his mind, an irresistible order: “Sleep!”
He slumped on to his back, his lidded eyes staring where they dared not look when open.
The feet moved a fraction, their countless planes shifting and angling into each other. Came a long-drawn sigh susurrating from the very limits of the space-time continuum. It expressed infinite patience.
“Nothing for it but to try again.”
He took something from the sleeper’s side, extended its cellular structure of blood and flesh and bone, shaped it, and breathed into it the breath of life.
Leaving the woman to await the man’s awakening, the Stranger went away.