“Will we be attacked?”
“Of course. And you will counterattack again and again. As a result of this plan of yours, you hope to be able to attack first, but your military won’t credit my ability to see into the future.”
“When will the attack come?” Gates prodded.
“No less than forty, not more than fifty-two days from today. Minor variables that cannot be properly estimated give that margin for error.”
“Who will win?”
“Win? There will be no victory. That is the essential point. In the past the wars between city states ceased because the city states became too small as social units in a shrinking world. Today a country is too small a social unit. This war will be the terminal point for inter-country warfare, as it will dissolve all financial, linguistic and religious barriers.”
“What will the population of the world be when this war is over?” was Gates’ next question.
“Between fifty and a hundred and fifty millions. There will be an additional fifty per cent shrinkage due to disease before population begins to climb again.”
There was silence in the darkened room. The boy sat motionless, awaiting the next query. Badloe had taken his fingers from the boy’s pulse and sat with his face in his hands.
Gates said slowly, “I don’t understand. You spoke as though your type of individual has come into the world as an evolutionary answer to atomics. If this war will happen, in what sense are you saving mankind?”
“My influence is zero at this point,” was the boy’s answer. “I will be ready when the war is over. I will survive it, because I can anticipate the precautions to be taken. After it is over the ability to read the future will keep mankind from branching off into a repetition of militarism and fear. I have no part in this conflict.” _
“But you have improved our techniques!” Gates protested.
“I have increased your ability to destroy,” Billy corrected him. “Were I to increase it further, you would be enabled to make the earth completely uninhabitable.”
“Then your work is through?”
“Obviously. The result of the drug you have administered to me will be to impair the use of my intellect. I will be sent away. My abilities will return in sufficient time to enable me to survive.”
Gates’ voice became a whisper. “Are there others like you?”
“I estimate that there are at least twenty in the world today. Obviously many have managed to conceal their gifts. The oldest should be not more than nine. They are scattered all over the earth. They all have an excellent chance of survival. Thirty years from now there will be more than a thousand of us.”
Gates glanced over at Janks, saw the fear and the obvious question. Folmer had the same expression on his face. With a voice that had in it a small touch of madness, Gates said, “What is the future of those of us in this room? Will we survive?”
“I have not explored the related probabilities. I knew in New York that it was necessary for Folmer to survive to bring me here and to tell you of my abilities. It can be calculated.”
“Now?”
“Give me thirty seconds.”
Again the room the room was silent. Badloe had lifted his face, his eyes naked with fear. Janks shifted uneasily. Folmer stood, barely breathing. Gates twisted his Fingers together. The seconds ticked by. Four men waited for the word of death or life.
Billy Massner licked his lips. “Not one of you will live more than three months from this date.” It was a flat, calm statement. Badloe made a sound in his throat.
“He’s crazy!” Janks snarled.
They wanted to believe Janks. They had to believe the boy.
Gates whispered, “How will we die?”
They watched the small-boy face. Slowly the impassivity of it melted away. The gray eyes opened and they were not the dead gray eyes the men had grown accustomed to. They were the frightened eyes of boyhood. There was fear on the small face. Fear and indecision.
The voice had lost its flat and deadly calm.
“Who are you?” the boy asked, close to tears. “What do you want? What are you doing to me? I want to go home!”
In the darkened room four men stood and watched a small boy cry.
Flaw
Originally published in Startling Stories, January 1949.
“I never thought much about the frontier of the stars until, in 1959, I met young Johnny Pritchard...”
I rather imagine that I am quite mad. Nothing spectacular, you understand. Nothing calling for restraint, or shock therapy. I can live on, dangerous to no one but myself.
This beach house at La Jolla is comfortable. At night I sit on the rocks and watch the distant stars and think of Johnny. He probably wouldn’t like the way I look now. My fingernails are cracked and broken and there are streaks of gray in my blonde hair. I no longer use makeup. Last night I looked at myself in the mirror and my eyes were dead.
It was then that I decided that it might help me to write all this down. I have no idea what I’ll do with it.
You see, I shared Johnny’s dreams.
And now I know that those dreams are no longer possible. I wonder if he learned how impossible they were in the few seconds before his flaming death.
There have always been people like Johnny and me. For a thousand years mankind has looked at the stars and thought of reaching them. The stars were to be the new frontier, the new worlds on which mankind could expand and find the full promise of the human soul.
I never thought much about it until I met Johnny. Five years ago. My name is Carol Adlar. At that time I was a government clerk working in the offices at the rocket station in Arizona. It was 1959. The year before the atomic drive was perfected.
Johnny Pritchard. I figured him out, I thought. A good-looking boy with dark hair and a careless grin and a swagger. That’s all I saw in the beginning. The hot sun blazed down on the rocks and the evenings were cool and clear.
There were a lot of boys like Johnny at the rocket station — transferred from Air Corps work. Volunteers. You couldn’t order a man off the surface of the earth in a rocket.
The heart is ever cautious. Johnny Pritchard began to hang around my desk, a warm look in his eyes. I was as cool as I could be. You don’t give your heart to a man who soars up at the tip of a comet plume. But I did.
I told myself that I would go out with him one evening and I would be so cool to him that it would cure him and he would stop bothering me. I expected him to drive me to the city in his little car. Instead we drove only five miles from the compound, parked on the brow of a hill looking across the moon-silvered rock and sand.
At first I was defensive, until I found that all he wanted to do was talk. He talked about the stars. He talked in a low voice that was somehow tense with his visions. I found out that first evening that he wasn’t like the others. He wasn’t merely one of those young men with perfect coordination and high courage. Johnny had in him the blood of pioneers. And his frontier was the stars.
“You see, Carol,” he said, “I didn’t know a darn thing about the upstairs at the time of my transfer. I guess I don’t know much right now. Less, probably than the youngest astronomer or physicist on the base. But I’m learning. I spend every minute I can spare studying about it. Carol, I’m going upstairs some day. Right out into space. And I want to know about it. I want to know all about it.
“We’ve made a pretty general mess of this planet. I sort of figure that the powers-that-be planned it that way. They said, ‘We’ll give this puny little fella called man a chance to mess up one planet and mess it up good. But we’ll let him slowly learn how to travel to another. Then, by the time he can migrate, he will be smart enough to turn the next planet into the sort of a deal we wanted him to have in the beginning. A happy world with no wars, no disease, no starvation.’ ”