The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde Read online

  And for some unfathomable reason, the thought filled him with a nameless dread.

  The first red rays of dawn filtered through the leafy walls of the hut. Kelton knew that they would be flashing off the silvery hull of the ship…

  Paradise… the planet was literally paradise for a man… He kissed his woman gently on the neck. Funny, he thought, none of us have given them names. Why?

  He was beginning to understand… The creature sleeping in his arms was not a woman, she was Woman as seen through the eyes of Man, she was his personal wish-fulfillment. Her whole life, quite literally, was him. She had no independent existence of her own. The proof of it was that when he was gone, she would cease to exist…

  And suddenly he understood why Dexter and Blair were completely content, and he was not. To Dexter, Woman was Mother. To Blair, Woman was Slave. Neither concept required that a woman have an independent existence.

  But Kelton realized that to him, Woman had always been Mystery.

  And a creature of his own mind could hold no mystery for him, only the unsatisfying illusion of it.

  Though he loved her, though she loved him, though she was literally perfect, he knew that it could never be enough.

  For another word for perfection was death.

  Now he fully understood what he had only sensed before. He knew why the thought of other men walking this planet filled him with dread. Seventy percent of the females on this planet were teleplasm…

  The teleplasm was pushing out the real females, the females that produced children…

  Now he knew that it was not for himself that he had been afraid, but for the human race.

  What would happen when men learned of this planet? What would happen when they took teleplasm back to Earth, as they inevitably would?

  What would happen to the real women; the women who were more than a reflection of men’s desire; the women who had minds and dreams and desires of their own?

  Who would father the children of the human race?

  How long would there be a human race?

  He understood, and he knew what he had to do, but there was no comfort in it for him. It was a knife in his heart. For the creature sleeping in his arms knew only that she felt like a woman, that she loved him with every fibre of her being.

  God help me! he thought forlornly, I love her too…

  But he knew what he had to do. Extinction for the human race was too high a price to pay for love. A price that would have to be paid by generations yet unborn, generations that would never be born unless…

  A part of him had known from the beginning, that the price of paradise was always too high, that if men had the choice, they would choose perfection over reality, even if it meant death in the long run.

  And that choice must not be permitted to exist.

  Carefully, inchwise, so as not to wake her, so that there need be no good-bys, he disengaged himself from her arms and got up. He dressed himself quickly, and, not daring to look back, he went to the ship.

  Kelton put the ship into a ninety-minute polar orbit so that it would eventually pass over the entire planet.

  For long minutes, he sat stonily in the pilot’s chair, staring at the soft green planet below him.

  You can still change your mind, he kept thinking, you can still go back…

  And be the other kind of murderer. The murderer of the human race.

  There was no way out. The teleplasm meant extinction for Mankind. Man and teleplasm could not share the same Galaxy. Other men had faced this decision before, with other lifeforms.

  Survey had a nice neutral term for it: “Planetary Sterilization.”

  It had been done to Tau Ceti II. It had been done to Algol V. It had been done to Lathrop III. Every Survey ship was equipped to do a “Planetary Sterilization.”

  All he had to do was press the button. The ship’s computer would fire the missiles at the proper times. The whole planet would be covered in a nice geometric pattern. Twenty cobalt-sodium warheads were more than enough for a planet of this size.

  Forgive me, Blair! Forgive me, Dexter! Forgive me, child of my mind!

  He knew that he would never be able to forgive himself.

  He pushed the button.

  The Equalizer

  The Israeli experimental station was small and inconspicuous. It had been carefully planned that way. Five one-story cement-block buildings arranged as the sides of a pentagon, enclosed by a frail, unelectrified fence. True, there were a few soldiers guarding the fence, but this far into the Negev it would have been unusual for them to be absent, even if this were the agricultural station it pretended to be.

  A small, innocuous cluster of buildings in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a sea of rock and sand. A few soldiers, a few scientists, a series of labs—

  The Israeli equivalent of the Manhattan Project.

  Dr. Sigmund Lams’ hands were shaking. But his eyes did not bother to register the tremor; they were fixed on the metal box which sat on the laboratory table.

  It was about the size of a small overnight bag, and it weighed considerably less than a hundred pounds.

  And this, he thought, is only the prototype—crude, jury-rigged, five times the size that a perfected and miniaturized model would be.

  How big was the first atomic bomb, he mused. Measured in the thousands of pounds. Now they had little ones a man could carry.

  Lams chewed on his lower lip. What have I done, he thought.

  How did it all come to this? It began so innocently, with the discovery of enigmatic, quasi-stellar objects far beyond the bounds of the galaxy. What could’ve been further removed from military consideration?

  But these mysterious objects had been found to be giving off literally incredible amounts of energy, more than could possibly be accounted for by any known reaction, including even matter-antimatter reactions.

  It had been such an innocently fascinating problem. One thing led to another. What were these quasi-stellar objects, and perhaps even more important, how were they giving off so much energy?

  It had been the most exciting work of his career. His calculations all pointed to only one possible answer, only one reaction could possibly produce energy in such quantities—the total annihilation of matter.

  The inevitable next question was how. What could bring about the total annihilation of matter, the total conversion of matter to energy?

  What a question that had been. Larus winced even now as he thought of the torturous months of calculations that had led to his first tentative answer to that question. That first paper had done nothing more than gingerly sketch the requirements for a theoretical field that would cause any matter enclosed in it to be instantly converted entirely to energy. He had never dreamed that such a field could actually be produced electronically, not then—

  But other people had.

  Three papers! Larus thought. Three obscure and largely speculative papers in an astrophysics journal. At the time, I would’ve been amazed if fifty physicists in the whole world could’ve understood what I was talking about.

  Larus stared at the metal box on the table. The military, he thought grimly, have a way of picking out the essentials in any scientific area. At least what they consider the essentials.

  One little sentence in one of the papers had brought the Israeli military down on him like a horde of hungry relatives. “… Therefore, these equations would indicate that it is theoretically possible to generate enormous quantities of energy at modest cost, since the output would come from the destruction of matter itself, while the input needed to generate such a field would be comparatively insignificant…”

  Such a vague and general sentence, thought Larus. But in certain minds, it had meant four simple, explicit words:

  A Big Cheap Bomb.

  Oh, they had been so sly and clever about it. So, Dr. Larus, how would you like a government grant to continue your interesting work on these… ah, quasi-stellar objects? And don’t you feel that it would
help you to understand the physics of these objects if you could produce the field that causes matter to annihilate itself? Well, it’s a pleasure to tell you that your government will be proud to contribute to the advancement of… er… astrophysics. In fact, we’ll build you a nice little lab in the middle of the Negev where it’s nice and peaceful.

  It had all seemed so innocent at the time, a chance to work in peace on a fascinating problem. And the results, after three years of work, were—this.

  Dr. Larus stared woodenly at the metal box. Stop fooling yourself! he thought. You know what they will call it, you’ve known for a long time. There’s only one name for that little monstrosity. Go ahead, say it out loud.

  “The Conversion Bomb,” he muttered softly, “the Conversion Bomb.”

  Within that little box was an explosive force equivalent to a hydrogen bomb.

  E=mc2, he thought, Einstein’s equation. Poor Einstein, a saintly man who wanted only peace. And now I have made that equation come true, completely true.

  The theory is so complex, he thought, but the device is so simple. Once you know how, once you have the blueprints, it’s so cheap and simple to make. A pound or so of… anything at all in the field chamber. Throw the switch, and the field is turned on. Whatever is in the chamber is transformed entirely into energy… and hundreds of square miles are destroyed.

  So simple… Larus had no illusions about how long the secret could be kept, perhaps no one but himself really understood the theory behind the thing, but a… a television repairman could build a Bomb from the plans.

  And how long had the secret of the atom bomb been kept?

  “Dr. Larus,” boomed the powerful voice of Colonel Ariah Sharet, and he stalked into the room. “It is done?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he bounded to Laras’ side. He was a tall, powerful man of thirty-seven, dressed in khaki shirt and shorts. His hair was black and straight, and his coarse skin was deeply tanned. He wore a .45 at his hip.

  “It is done,” murmured Larus, his frail, old body appearing even smaller than usual beside the robust Sharet.

  “It’s so small!” said Sharet.

  “It can be made smaller,” sighed Larus. “Much smaller.”

  “We are saved,” exulted Sharet. “Do you realize what you’ve done, Dr. Larus? You’ve saved Israel. We know that the Egyptians have missiles, and we can be sure that within the next few years they will have an atomic bomb. Forty million Arabs armed with nuclear missiles against two million of us… What chance would we have? We would be slaughtered, driven into the sea. Sooner or later, it would have had to come. But now…”

  “Now we can drive them into the sea?” said Larus. “Now we can do the slaughtering?”

  “You don’t understand the implications of the Conversion Bomb. How much would such a bomb cost to make? If we went into volume production?”

  “How much? Two, three thousand pounds at the very most. It’s all so simple and cheap, once you know how. Cut-rate annihilation.”

  “Well, don’t you see? We can make hundreds of bombs. And they can be made so small, they can literally be delivered by parcel post. As of today, Israel is a world power.”

  “A world power,” sneered Larus. “Two million people, a country so small that a jet can scarcely make a 180° turn without leaving it. A world power indeed. My dear colonel, there are seven hundred million Chinese in the world, over two hundred million Russians, an equal number of Americans, not to mention forty million or so Arabs. This is power.”

  Colonel Sharet smiled. “As the Americans would say, the Conversion Bomb is ‘The Great Equalizer.’ What does population, resources, land mean? For a few million pounds, we can have a destructive capacity equal to that of America or Russia, let alone the Arabs. The base of power is now technology. One scientific advance like the Conversion Bomb negates any disparity in population or land. Israel is now a world power. It is not a dream, it is a cold fact.”

  “Ah, Colonel, forgive me,” sighed Larus, “but you talk like a colonel. So little Israel has developed a Conversion Bomb. So now we are a world power. Shall I recite for you a list of countries that will be able to do what we have done? Sweden, Belgium, Italy, Brazil, Nigeria, Japan, Indonesia, Turkey… on and on and on, down to Costa Rica, Liberia, Laos, Luxemburg, and who knows, some day Monaco, San Marino, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim. World power is now a very cheap commodity. It costs only a few million pounds.”

  Sharet subsided. It was true. “World power” would soon be a meaningless term. Power… it would mean only the power of every nation to destroy every other.

  “You are right,” he said, “but even so, we have saved ourselves. At least we will be equal to the Arabs now. We have no desire to conquer, only to live. I am a sabra, I have lived my whole life under the guns of the Arabs. Now at least we will know that we will always be as strong as they. We need no longer feel like ants, in perpetual danger of being squashed by elephants.”

  “I am not a sabra,” said Larus. “I have learned in different schools. My degree is from Heidelberg. I have also done postgraduate work in Belsen. Colonel, all men are not like you and me. There are those who would rather kill than live. What would Hitler have done in your fine new world, when every country holds the power to annihilate every other? You know as well as I. He would destroy the world. How many countries are there in the world? Over a hundred. Are you going to tell me that one out of a hundred countries will not produce another would-be dictator? We can both name several madmen ruling countries today who would use Conversion Bombs to destroy the world, out of sheer lust for killing.”

  “What would you have us do?”

  “Forget you ever saw this Bomb!” cried Larus. “Destroy this place. Let me burn my notes and destroy the prototype. Let Man forget this monstrosity, if we are lucky, until he is ready for it, until there are no more nations, but only Humanity.”

  Sharet frowned. He had expected this. “And what of us? Soon the Arabs will be ready to destroy us. Destroy us they will. It’s we or them.”

  “What are the lives of even two million people, compared to the whole world?” said Larus.

  “Do we not have a right to live? Are we all saints? Can you expect us to let them wipe us out, when we have a weapon that can save us?”

  Larus sighed. “Could not the same words be as justly spoken by the Indians, the Pakistanis, the blacks of South Africa, the Tibetans?”

  “We have a right to live!” exploded Sharet. “Perhaps the Tibetans and the Angolans and the Cambodians have as much right as we do. Do you think they would forget about a weapon that could save them, for the sake of Humanity? Would our enemies?”

  Larus felt old and used up and defeated. Did Einstein feel this way after Hiroshima, he wondered.

  “One favor,” he said. “Grant me one favor. Don’t send word to Tel Aviv until you’ve slept on it. Or tried to. A small boon to a tired old man?”

  Colonel Sharet was not a man without compassion. Nor a man completely without doubts.

  “Very well,” the colonel said. “I certainly owe you that much.”

  “You owe it to yourself as well,” said Larus.

  “Perhaps…” muttered Sharet, “perhaps…”

  Dr. Larus could not sleep, but then, he had not expected to be able to.

  He looked up at the black desert sky; the thousands of stars seemed far away and very cold. The landscape was harsh, bare and rocky.

  A tough, ruthless, impersonal land, the Negev, he thought. Parched and blazing during the day, cold, bleak and dangerous at night.

  He was glad that he was within the fence. The fedayin still prowled the Negev at night. Heat during the day, clandestine assassins at night…

  He felt more kindly towards Sharet, now. Ariah Sharet had been born and raised in this hard hostile land. It was a land that bred warriors. One had to fight simply to stay alive. A whole life spent with a gun always at your side…

  No wonder Sharet wants the Bomb! Sooner or later, the ene
my will become too strong. There are just too many of them, and once they have atomic bombs…

  But those stars… The same stars, he knew, shone down over the Himalayas, over the war-torn rice paddies of Southeast Asia, over the bloodied streets of Budapest… A hundred suffering peoples, a hundred just and righteous causes. Do any of them have less right than we to use the Conversion Bomb?

  And with dread certainty, he knew it would come to that. This year, an Israeli Conversion Bomb. The word would get out, sooner or later. And the Indians, the Cubans, the Pakistanis, the Angolans, every people that believed they had a wrong to right, an enemy to defend against, a partitioned nation to unite, would build Conversion Bombs…

  And they’ll all be as right as we are. Not more, not less.

  A righteous world, armed for Armageddon, every people wanting only to survive, wanting only what was justly theirs. A cache of gunpowder waiting for a spark that must eventually come.

  Which aggrieved nation or would-be nation would be Man’s executioner? The Israelis? The Kurds? The Ukrainians?

  Did it matter? Did it really matter?

  Sigmund Larus looked up at the desert stars. Man was so small and puny, and the heavens were so grand.

  But Man, small as he was, could blast this planet to a lifeless cinder.

  Larus looked up into the heavens, and did something he had not done for twenty years. He prayed.

  Ariah Sharet could not sleep either. He was trained in two fields—history and military science—and both preached decisiveness. Yet Sharet could not rid himself of doubt.

  As he wandered about the compound, he thought of Larus. By no stretch of the imagination could Larus be considered a traitor. A Jew who had lived through the horrors of Hitler’s Europe was de facto an Israeli patriot.

  And yet, he was willing to see his country destroyed, rather than take the risk of building Conversion Bombs.

  A question of backgrounds, Sharet thought. A man is born with a gun in his cradle, and if he is threatened, he kills. Another man learns to live under the heel of an all-powerful tyrant, and when his life is threatened, he meekly submits.