It began as though the destruction of the inter-universal messenger were about to repeat itself in reverse, encompassing the whole of creation in the process. Crawls of greenish-yellow light were beginning to move high up in the Hevian sky, at first as ghostly as auroral traces, then with a purposeful writhing and brightening which seemed as horrifyingly like life as the copulation of a mass of green-gold nematode worms seen under phase- contrast lighting. Particle counters began to chatter on the board, and Hazleton jumped to monitor the cumulative readings.
“Where is that stuff coming from—can you tell?” Amalfi said.
“It seems to come from nearly a hundred discrete point-sources, surrounding us in a sphere with a diameter of about a light year,” Miramon said. He sounded preoccupied; he was doing something with controls whose purpose was unknown to Amalfi.
“Hmm. Ships, without a doubt. Well, now we know where they get their name, anyhow. But what is it they’re using?”
“That’s easy,” Hazleton said grimly. “It’s anti-matter.”
“How can that be?”
“Look at the frequency analysis on this secondary radiation we’re getting, and you’ll see. Every one of those ships must be primarily a particle accelerator of prodigious size. They’re sending streams of stripped heavy anti- matter atoms right down the gravitational ingeodesics toward us—that’s what makes the paths the stuff is following look so twisted. They’ve found a way to generate and project primary cosmics made of anti-matter atoms, and in quantity. When they strike our atmosphere, both disintegrate—”
“And the planet gets a dose of high-energy gamma radiation,” Amalfi said. “And they must have known how to do it for a long time, since they’re named after the technique. Helleshin! What a way to conquer a planet! They can either sterilize the populace, or kill it off, at will, without ever even coming close to the place.”
“We’ve had the sterility dose already,” Hazleton said quietly.
“That can hardly matter now,” Estelle said, in an even softer voice.
“The killing dose won’t matter either,” Hazleton said. “Radiation sickness takes months to develop, even when it’s going to be fatal.”
“They could disable us quickly enough,” Amalfi said harshly. “We’ve got to stop this somehow. We need these last days!”
“What do you propose?” Hazleton said. “Nothing that we’ve set up will work in a globe at a distance of a light year … except—”
“Except the base surge,” Amalfi said. “Let’s use it, and quick.”
“What is this?” Miramon said.
“We’ve got your spindizzies set up for a single burn-out overload pulse. In the position we’re in, the resulting single wave-front ought to tie space into knots for—well, we don’t know how far the effect will carry, but a long way.”
“Maybe even all the way to the limits of the universe,” Dr. Schloss said.
“Well, what of it?” Amalfi demanded. “It’s due to be destroyed anyhow in only ten days—”
“Not if you destroy it first,” Schloss said. “If it isn’t here when the anti-matter universe passes through it, all bets are off; there’ll be nothing we can do.”
“It’ll still be here.”
“Not in any useful sense—not if the matter in it is tied up in billions of gravitational whirlpools. Better let the Web kill us than destroy the future evolution of two universes, Amalfi! Can’t you give over playing god, even now?”
“All right,” Amalfi said. “Look at those dosimeters, and look at that sky. What have you to suggest?”
The sky was now one even intensity of glow, like a full overcast lit by a dull sun. Outside, the lower mountains of the range stood with their tree-covered flanks, so completely without shadow as to suggest that the windows ringing the tower were actually parts of a flat mural done by an unskilled hand. The counters had given over chattering and were putting out a subdued roar.
“Only what I just suggested,” Schloss said hopelessly. “Load up on anti-radiation drugs, and hope we can stay on our feet for ten days. What else is there? They’ve got us.”
“Excuse me,” Miramon said. “That is not altogether certain. We have some resources of our own. I have just launched one; it may be sufficient.”
“What is it?” Amalfi demanded. “I didn’t know you mounted any weapons. How long will we have to wait before it acts?”
“One question at a time,” Miramon said. “Of course we mount weapons. We never talk about them, because there were children on our planet, and still are, the gods receive them. But we had to face the fact that we might some day be invested by a hostile fleet, considering how far afield we were ranging from our home galaxy, and how many stars we were visiting. Thus we provided several means for defense. One of these we meant never to use, but we have just used it now.”
“And that is?” Hazleton said tensely.
“We would never have told you, except for the coming end,” Miramon said. “You have praised us as chemists, Mayor Amalfi. We have applied chemistry to physics. We discovered how to poison an electromagnetic field by resonance—the way the process of catalysis is poisoned in chemistry. The poison field propagates itself along a carrier wave, and controlling field, almost any signal which is continuous and conforms to the Faraday equations. Look.”
He pointed out the window. The light did not seem to have lessened any; but it was now mottled with leprous patches. In a space of seconds, the patches spread and flowed into each other, until the light was now confined to isolated luminous clouds, rapidly being eaten away at the edges, like dead cells being dissolved by the enzymes of decay bacteria.
When the sky went totally dark, Amalfi could see the hundred streamers of the particle streams pointed inward at He; at least it looked a hundred, though actually he could hardly have seen more than fifteen from any one spot on the planet. And these too were being eaten away, receding into blackness.
The counters went back to stuttering, but they did not quite stop.
“What happens when the effect gets back to the ships?” Web asked.
“It will poison the circuits themselves,” Miramon said. “The entities in the ships will suffer total nerve-block. They will die, and so will the ships. Nothing will be left but a hundred hulks.”
Amalfi let out a long, ragged sigh.
“No wonder you weren’t interested in our breadboard rigs,” he said. “With a thing like that, you could have become another Web of Hercules yourselves.”
“No,” Miramon said. “That we could never become.”
“Gods of all stars!” Hazleton said. “Is it over? As fast as that?”
Miramon’s smile was wintery. “I doubt that we will hear from the Web of Hercules again,” he said. “But what your City Fathers call the countdown continues. It is only ten days to the end of the world.”
Hazleton turned back to the dosimeters. For a moment, he simply stared at them. Then, to Amalfi’s astonishment, he began to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Amalfi growled.
“See for yourself. If Miramon’s people had ever tangled with the Web in the red world, they would have lost.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Hazleton said, wiping his eyes, “while he was beating them off, we all passed the lethal dose of hard radiation. We are all dead as doornails as we sit here!”
“And this is a joke?” Amalfi said.
“Of course it’s a joke, boss. It doesn’t make the faintest bit of difference. We don’t live in that kind of ‘real world’ any more. We have a dose. In two weeks we’ll begin to become dizzy, and lose our hair, and vomit. In three weeks we’ll be dead. And you
“I see it,” Amalfi said. “I can subtract ten from fourteen and get four; you mean we’ll live until we die.”
“I can’t abide a man who kills my jokes.”
“It’s a pretty old joke,” Amalfi said slowly. “But maybe it’s still funny, at that; if it was good enough for Aristophanes, I guess it’s good enough for me.”
