Edmond Hamilton - City at World's End

A great silence fell upon them. By ones and twos, and then by hundreds, they knelt to pray. And others, by the hundreds, stood unspeaking, looking solemnly upward to the crest of the ridge. Here and there, a child began to cry.

Slowly, gripped as in a strange and fateful dream, Kenniston mounted again to where Arnol and the others stood. Far beyond them he saw the dome of the city, still glowing with light as they had left it, lonely in the vast barrenness of the plain.

He thought of the black thing waiting alone in the city to make its nightmare plunge, and a deep tremor shook him. He reached out and took Varn Allan’s hand.

In that last minute before Arnol’s fingers pressed the final pattern on the control board, Varn Allan looked past Kenniston, down at the silent, waiting thousands who were the last of all the races of old Earth.

“I see now,” she whispered, “that in spite of all we have gained since your day, we have lost something, too. A courage, a blind, brave something—I’m glad I stayed!” Arnol drew a sharp and painful breath.

“It is done,” he said.

For a long, eternal moment, the dead Earth lay unstirring. Then Kenniston felt the ridge leap under his feet—once, twice, four times. The sharp grinding shocks of the capper bombs, sealing the great shaft.

Arnol watched the quivering needles of the dials. He had ceased his trembling now. It was too late for anything, even emotion.

Deep, deep within the buried core of the Earth a trembling was born, a dilating shudder that came slowly upward to the barren rocks and touched them and was gone.

It was as though a dead heart had suddenly started to beat again. To beat strongly, exultantly, a planet reborn…

The pointers on the panel of dials had gone quite mad. Gradually they quivered back to normal. All but one row of them, at which Arnol and his crew stared with intensity.

Kenniston could bear the terrible silence no longer.

“Has it…” His voice trailed away into hoarseness.

Arnol turned very slowly toward him. He said, as though it was difficult for him to speak. “Yes. The reaction is begun. There is a great flame of warmth and life inside Earth now. It will take weeks for that warmth and life to creep up to the surface, but it will come.”

He turned his back then, on Kenniston, on all of them. What he had to say was for the tired, waiting young men who had labored with him so long.

He said to them, “Here on this little Earth, long ago, one of our savage ancestors kindled a world. And there are all the others, all the cold, dying worlds out there…”

Kenniston heard no more. A babel had broken loose. Varn Allan was clinging to him, and Gorr Holl was shouting deaf-eningly, and he heard the stammering questions of Mayor Garris and Hubble’s shaking voice.

Over all came the surge of thousands of feet The thousands of Middletown were coming up the slope, scrambling, running, a life-or-death question on their white faces.

“Tell them, Ken,” said Hubble, his voice thick.

Kenniston stood upon the ridge, and the crowd below froze tensely silent as he shouted down to them. “It has succeeded! All danger is over, and in weeks the heat of the core will begin to reach the surface…”

He stopped. These were not the words that could reach their hearts.

Then he found those words, and called them to the thousands.

“It has been chill winter on Earth, for a million years. But now, soon, spring is coming back to Earth. Spring!”

They could understand that. They began to laugh, and to weep, and then to shout and shout.

They were still shouting when the great Control cruisers came humming swiftly down from the sky.

Slowly, slowly, during all these weeks, the spring had come. It was not the spring of old Earth, but every day the wind blew a little more softly and now at last the first blades of grass were pushing upward, touching the ocher plains with green.

But only by hearsay did Kenniston know of that. Confined with the others in a building of New Middletown, it had seemed to him that the time would never end. The weeks of waiting for the special Committee of Governors to come from Vega, the weeks of the hearing itself, the slow gathering of testimony and careful sifting of motives. And now, the days they had waited for the final verdict.

Arnol was not worried. He was a happy man. He said very little, but he had had a triumph in his eyes all through the hearing. His lifework was justified, and he was content.

Nor were Gorr Holl and Magro worried. The big Capellan, even now when they awaited the decision, was still jubilant.

“Hell, what can they do?” he said to Kenniston, for the twentieth time.

“The thing’s done. The Arnol process is proved practicable, and by now the whole galaxy knows of it. They can’t refuse now to let the humanoids’ dying worlds make use of it. They wouldn’t dare!”

Magro added, “Nor can they force your people to evacuate Earth now that it is getting warmer. It wouldn’t make sense.”

Kenniston said, “They can keep us locked up for the rest of our lives, and I wouldn’t enjoy that.”

Gorr Holl grinned widely at him. “Remember, man, we’re only emotional primitives, and they’ll have to make allowances for that.”

When they were led back into the big room for the verdict, Kenniston’s eyes swung, not to the group of three men and a humanoid that sat behind the table, but to Varn Allan. He knew that her own career was at stake in this hearing. She did not look upset, and she met his gaze with a grave little smile.

Lund, beside her, looked alert and faintly worried now. He shot a hard glance at Kenniston, but Kenniston had to turn his gaze as the reading of the verdict began.

The aging man who read it, the oldest of the four Governors, had no friendliness in his face. He spoke as one who reluctantly performs an unpleasant duty.

“You, the ringleaders in this thing, have rendered yourselves liable to the extremest penalties of Federation law by your direct defiance of the Governors,” he said. “It would be quite in order to direct a sentence of life imprisonment”

He looked down at them coldly. Gorr Holl whispered, “Just trying to scare us—” but he did not sound very confident now.

The old Governor continued. “But in this case it is quite impossible to reach a verdict on purely legalistic grounds. We must admit that your fait accompli has created a new situation. The Board of Governors has now given approval to the use of the Arnol process on certain other planets—”

Kenniston found it hard, hard, to realize that a long, great battle for the survival of worlds was ending in these phrases.

“—on certain other planets, and that presents us with a legal impasse. To punish you now for your use of it here would be, morally if not legally, punishing you for infraction of a no-longer-existing law.”

Gorr Holl uttered such a long and noisy exhalation of relief that he was promptly glared into silence.

“We are unable, therefore, to do other than dismiss you with the official reprimand of the Board of Governors for your behavior.”

Now that the moment had come, now that it was over, Kenniston found that he felt very little emotion, after all. The issues had been so vast that they had dwarfed his personal fate. He knew that that feeling would pass, that later he would be glad and thankful, but now—

The Governor, though, had not finished. He was speaking directly now to Varn Allan.

“Over and above the main issue, there remains the conduct of the responsible officials in dealing with it We are forced to express official censure of what appears to be inexcusable bungling of a psychological problem by the Administrator in charge, and—” here he looked toward Norden Lund—“and on the part of the Sub-Administrator, obvious attempts to hamper his superior for selfish reasons.”