I lost my head. Terrified, I grabbed for the safety belt concealed beneath my stolen tunic, touched the button that controlled my conductor-screen. The screen shimmered into instant life, and not a moment too soon. Rays from the weapons pointed at me flashed from all sides, sparked against the opalescent curtain of the screen and were dissipated.
I was safe—but only for an instant.
For I had made my second great mistake. I was too close to the atom-rocket. My conductor screen grazed the warhead itself!
Its energies surged through the unstable elements in the warhead; a warning bell sprang into clamorous life. The group around me froze in their tracks, mouths open, faces mirroring fright and disbelief—and the frightful power of the strained atoms within the warhead began to grind toward nuclear fission!
There was only one thing to do, and a poor choice it was! But in a moment the warhead would explode, and of me and my mission, and the whole future of Earth, nothing would be left but a puff of fiery vapor.
Quickly I dropped the shield of my conductor screen. Trusting that my luck would hold, and the men around me would be too dazed to fire their weapons again, I drew my katonator, set it at drain, focused it on the atomic warhead.
The twin violet beams sprang out and impinged on the silvery metal, pierced it and sucked the heart from the seething mass of erupting matter within. Blinding energies were drawn from those toppling atomic structures, surging through the carrier-beam of the katonator into the photon-pack cartridges at my waist. I had an instant's fear as I wondered if the storage pack would hold all the mighty energies of the warhead, far greater than the maximum load for which it was designed.
But lightnings of static electricity played about my head, dissipating brilliantly but harmlessly into the air, and in an instant the danger was over. The bursting energies o the warhead had been drawn out, and the mass of matter inside it was inert.
Before me lay the atom-rocket, harmless and dead.
I had destroyed Earth's most potent weapon!
I GIVE those ancients credit for bravery Dangerous though I must have seemed they closed in on me without firing their weapons. Meekly I raised my arms over my head.
The white-haired general blazed hatred at me from his pale eyes.
"Who are you?" he demanded.
I shrugged. Carefully I phrased my words in their outlandish tongue.
"I am a—a visitor from the future," I said.
"I regret the accident that just happened more than I can say."
"Regret if?" he blazed. "Hah! You'll regret it twice as much when you face the firing squad!"
I spread my hands helplessly. In truth, death had no terrors for me now. A firing squad would seem almost a blessing—for I had destroyed the bomb that would have blasted Venus. Whatever happened now, the future before me was changed—and in a changed future I had no place, and my Elren would not exist.!
"Take him out and shoot him," the general cried.
I turned to go to death, almost eagerly. In my heart I whispered:
"Elren! Elren, my lost love!"
The technician who had unmasked me interfered.
"Wait!" he begged. "Let me question him, sir. Perhaps he's telling the truth."
The general glowered. "What's the difference? He's wrecked the bomb!" But he hesitated and finally said, "All right. Question him. The harm's done anyhow."
Sunk in despair I scarcely heard the other officer's sharp queries, but he was hesitant and I told him whence I had come, and why. He looked at me incredulously.
"But the bomb?" he demanded. "What did you do to it?"
I patted the photon-pack cartridges strung along my belt. "I had to drain it," I said. "It was about to explode—"
"Drain it? How?"
"With the katonator." I explained to him how the energies of the exploding atoms were drawn off through the katonator-beams and trapped in the photon-prick.
He stared at the tiny power cells, eyes wide but showing a sudden glint of hope.
"Can you take that energy out again and send it into another object?"
"You mean to energize the atom-bomb again?" I said. "No, of course not."
He was shaking his head. "I mean something else," he said. "Can you send them across fifty million miles of space?"
I stared at him, fascinated and afraid. "I dare not interfere." I whispered.
"But, you have interfered," he yelled. "You've wrecked our chance to win this war. You've got to help us!"
I stepped back, bewildered. What he said was true enough. Yet all my training, all the warnings of Elren and Master Lys, said over and over: You must not interfere!
Yet I had interfered already; I had started a new time-sequence by destroying Earth's chance to wipe out Venus. If I could neutralize that act by helping them now, perhaps there would be a chance.
"I will show you how to use the Katonator," I said weakly.
Silently I adjusted it, slipped the belt off and handed it to him. He led me outside to where stars blazed in a black night. He looked upward hesitantly, pointed to a brilliant blue planet.
"Is that it?" he asked one of his companions. The man nodded. Carefully he took aim, pressed the trigger as I had showed him.
Lightnings roared again! The twin violet beams leaped from the muzzle of the weapon, howled up into the heavens. In a fraction of a second the photon-pack was drained and the pyrotechnic display died away. All was silent.
One of the officers raced back into the building, pounded the keys of a calculator. He returned almost at once.
"At this distance it will take just under nine minutes for light to make the round trip," he said.
The officer who had fired the katonator whirled to confront me.
"Suppose I missed?" he cried in sudden alarm. "It is so far—a fraction of a second of arc would make the beam miss entirely."
I shook my head. "The beam fans out," I explained. "And a planet has mass and the photons are attracted by gravity. Even if they should miss, the attraction of the planet would draw them into it."
HE NODDED and was silent. Silence cloaked us all—a hundred ancients and myself, all staring up into a mysterious night.
Nine minutes passed as slowly as nine terrible years. But by and by" the hands of my chronometer completed their revolutions.
Suddenly we saw the katonator beams strike.
Above us a new sun blazed forth, kindling like the striking of a cosmic match. Night fled around us, and day came flaring up into noonday brilliance, and beyond. Heat poured down upon us, brilliant rays of sunlight more intense than I had ever seen. The dome behind me sparkled and glistened in the incredible radiations from the stricken planet millions of miles away, and for a moment I could almost feel the fierce actinic waves of ultra-violet, cosmics and a thousand other super-spectral radiations.
Then the peak was reached, and the light began to fade as all the hydrogen was transmuted and consumed. In a moment the flare of energies was gone, and the pale blue planet had become a glowing orange coal.
We had seen a billion persons dying in a planetary suttee.
The vastness of the dead stunned me. I found that I was sobbing, almost weeping as I felt myself stained with a cosmic guilt.
The officer who had destroyed a billion lives glanced at me in full understanding of what he had done. He placed a hand on my shoulder, strangely comforting.
"It couldn't be helped," he said in a voice that surged with emotion.
I nodded bleakly. It couldn't be helped. "It was for the sake of Earth," I said, blindly seeking justification. "Earth was destined to win, in my time-sequence, and I had interfered—I had to correct the consequences of my blunder—"