Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

Actually, that wasn’t quite true.

A few heart patients in the Adorable Leader’s domain did die. They were the ones who were unlucky enough to be wearing pacemakers when the electromagnetic blast struck, carrying more energy than a stroke of lightning. (But about the only North Koreans with access to any technology that expensive—that Western —were high-ranking officials. They weren’t missed.) Oh, and there were a handful of unfortunates flying in light planes who did not survive the consequent crashes. (As high-ranking as the others, and no more mourned.) In all, the latest regime change in North Korea came about with far fewer casualties than an average holiday weekend on the Western world’s highways.

In a fraction of a second all the Adorable Leader’s telephone systems were disabled. Most of his power lines were short-circuited. Every weapon his nation owned that was any more complex than a shotgun would fire no more—and the Adorable Leader’s North Korean nation had owned a vast number of weapons of all kinds. Without telephones or radios no one knew what was happening any farther away than a shout could be heard. The nation was no longer a threat to anyone, because no real nation existed anymore on that plot of ground.

There was, it is true, one small actual battle in this nonwar.

That was because of one obdurate colonel stationed outside of Kaesong. He could not, of course, understand what had happened, but at least he recognized that his army was at risk. He did what many colonels would have done. He fell out his command, issued them whatever rifles and pistols would fire, and launched them on an attack across the line.

It didn’t get very far.

It didn’t even get them all the way through the dense minefields that bracketed the Demarcation Line. Half a dozen of his frontline soldiers fell when mines went off, a score more as the South Korean troops on the south side of the line saw them coming and opened fire…and then ceased fire again, when they saw that the North Koreans were still coming forward, but slowly and cautiously now, and with their hands above their heads.

By then, of course, the whole world was beginning to learn what was going on…and not just our own world, either.

The rest of the galaxy heard the electronic roar of that weapon only as it reached them by the sluggish crawl—a mere 300,000 kilometers (old-fashioned people, and Americans, still said 186,000 miles) per second—of the velocity of light.

The One Point Fives’ armada, being fifteen light-years from Earth at the time of the blast, eventually crossed paths with the roar, which they detected had originated from those very beings they were on their way to annihilate.

No one on Earth knew that, of course.

Contrariwise, no one among the Machine-Stored, or any other part of the hegemony of the Grand Galactics, knew what had just occurred in North Korea, either. Therefore, when they heard that raucous electronic belch, they drew some reasonable, but wrong, conclusions.

It took years for that electromagnetic white noise to get to the home planets of any of the races subject to the Grand Galactics. Especially to that wrinkle in dark-matter flows that was home to the nearest cluster of the Grand Galactics themselves. And it had a bad effect. Potentially, indeed, it could have been a tragically, even terminally, bad one.

The difficulty was the nature of the weapon its owners called Silent Thunder.

Most human weapons were not a problem, since they depended either on chemical explosions or nuclear ones for their effect. Such puny events caused no fear in the nonbaryonic Grand Galactics. Silent Thunder, however, was a different kettle of particles. It could endanger parts of the Grand Galactics’ own armorarium. Not, of course, the trivial early version that had just put the Adorable Leader out of business, but the more advanced specimens that these pesky humans were bound to come up with before long—if they were allowed to.

Of course, they weren’t going to be allowed to. Their total annihilation was already on the schedule. When it had taken place, the problem would no longer exist.

Which meant, in the famous old words of William Schwenck Gilbert, as Ko-Ko explains his transgression to the Mikado, When an order is given, it’s as good as done, so actually it is done.

Up until that point the question of the wiping-out of the human race had been, in some sense, not totally resolved. That is, the Grand Galactics themselves, having given the order, had continued checking up on the situation because of the remote possibility that circumstances would change and they might want to cancel the order.

They did that no more. They saw no reason to go on bothering their heads (that is, if they had had heads) with this particular question.

So they erased it from their consciousness (or consciousnesses) in favor of more urgent, and certainly more entertaining, matters. High on that list were, one, a white dwarf star just on the point of stealing enough matter from its red-giant partner to go Type Ia supernova, two, some communications from their opposite numbers in other galaxies that needed at least to be acknowledged, and three, the question of whether to split off another Bill-like fraction of themselves to pay closer attention to the small and fast-moving minor galaxy whose orbit would cause the galaxy to crash into their own at any moment now—well, within the next four or five million years at the latest.

Very low on their list was anything that might remind them of that nasty little planet that its occupants called Earth. Why should they care? All of this was not, after all, an unprecedented experience for the Grand Galactics. In the thousands of millions of years since they had become, willy-nilly, the overlords of that part of the universe, they had encountered some 254 similarly dangerous races, and terminated some 251 of them. (The other three, whose offenses were marginal, were given another chance.)

It was not likely that the humans of Earth would become a fourth.

Back on Earth, there was confusion and worry. A mostly joyful confusion, to be sure, because hardly anybody in the world objected to the fact that the Adorable Leader—with his shyness and winsome apologetic public proclamations and, oh, yes, his million-man-strong army with all its rockets and nukes—was history. But questions were asked. By what right had America destroyed another country? And how the devil had they accomplished it?

No one answered. The American government merely said that the matter was under review and a statement would be issued, but didn’t say when. Military scientists around the world wished they had the wreckage of Silent Thunder to study. They didn’t, though. All that was left of Silent Thunder was a haze of white-hot liquid metal particles, rapidly cooling.

The news services were doing their best. Within an hour of when Silent Thunder had done its snuffing-out of the Adorable Leader’s North Korea, news copters from South Korea and Japan were circling over the now electronically silent land.

There was nothing to hear, but much to see. Their cameras picked up the crowds milling around in the vast, and normally deserted, avenues of Pyongyang, or the smaller groups that stood helplessly beside their unworkable aircraft at now-useless air force bases, or the even tinier groups that, sometimes, could not control their rage and confusion and took it out by firing their impotent arms at the interlopers.

Some of those cameras picked up other things. A few detected other helicopters, for instance, also circling out of range of any persons with hand weapons.

These other aircraft came from the same cities as the news reporters. Their mission, however, was not to observe. It was to inform. Every one of them was equipped with powerful loudspeakers, and each loudspeaker was manned by a former North Korean refugee. Each of them circled over the towns and neighborhoods they had come from, and each speaker introduced himself by name as he repeated his (or her) four-part message: