The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

“It will be the nicest package you ever took home, Billy,” the clerk said.

“My mother’s birthday’s tomorrow but we’re giving her her presents tonight,” Billy said.

“I’m glad to hear it,” the clerk said. “That’s really the best way.”

When you hear the tone, it will be exactly 4:03 p.m., Eastern Standard Time.

Orion Newcastle, who had fought hard for his party’s top nomination and then, heartbreakingly, had seen it go to a much less capable man, hurried to the office of that man, now the President of the United States.

Vice-President Newcastle, who had not attended the secret National Security Council meeting that morning, had no idea what the urgent summons to him could mean.

Orion Newcastle had missed other N.S.C. meetings, sometimes by his own choice. After all, his role there was usually limited to telling a few stories to the early-comers before the President arrived and, later, replying, “Certainly, Mr. President” whenever the other man said “Don’t you agree, Orion?”

Since the convention he had always agreed. After all, there was the President’s second term to be considered. Orion had no wish to be dumped, as Roosevelt had dumped Henry Wallace for Harry Truman. Orion sincerely hoped he bore no ill will toward the President. It certainly was his devout wish that the President should live to complete two full terms. But no one could read the future and man was mortal, as had been confirmed several times in Newcastle’s own lifetime. Thus it was wise not to jeopardize one’s position by thought or deed. And the Honorable Orion Newcastle, Vice-President of the United States, walked a little faster toward the President’s office.

When he got there, he found not only the President but the Secretary of State, the Chief Justice, the Speaker of the House, the top leadership of both parties in Congress, the diplomatic correspondents of the Washington newspapers and the chief Washington correspondents of the nation’s other leading papers and of the world’s ‘press services.

Orion knew all these men by their first names. They had drunk each other’s liquor and told each other bawdy stories. One or two of them, he knew, were responsible for spreading the so-called Orion Stories which had become a national fad, and which held him up to ridicule because of the Down-East accent which he had never lost. But all of them, it seemed to him, were now looking at him with new, and in some cases unprecedented, respect. He could not imagine what was in their minds.

So he said, grinning and broadening his accent slightly: “Well, Mr. President and gentlemen—Mr. President and other gentlemen, I should say—what solemn occasion is this?”

But none of them laughed at his quip. The others looked to the President, who said finally, after gazing out the window and then at each of them in turn:

“Gentlemen, in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution of the United States of America, I am resigning in favor of the Vice-President.”

Although he must have hinted at this in some way before Orion came in, there was a murmur of dissent which the President stilled by holding up his hand.

“It’s all been decided, gentlemen. I have drawn up the necessary papers—which I now sign.” He scratched his name quickly several times. “They require only the signatures of some of you to make them official and binding. Then in your presence, Mr. Newcastle will be sworn by the Chief Justice as the next President of the United States.”

“But why, sir?” the Secretary of State asked. “What possible reason can you have?”

“One of the very best,” the President said with a wry smile. “The reason is simply that I have learned, gentlemen, on the highest authority, that I have only a few more hours to live.”

And within the quarter-hour the shocked assemblage had signed their names and watched Orion Newcastle, whom two or three of them considered to be nothing more than an aging buffoon, be sworn in as President of the United States.

When you hear the tone, it will be exactly 7:10 p.m., Eastern Standard Time.

Andrew Grey wasn’t the only newsman trying to write the impossible story, of course. Fully 15 others in the huge newsroom were assigned to various angles. But his was to be the main story, the one which would appear in the right-hand column of page one under the eight-column, three-bank headline.

The final editions of the evening papers had already had a bash at it. To them it was a straightforward, if hopeless, story to be told. Perhaps the Post told it more simply than its rivals, with the one-word headline: “DOOMSDAY.”

Actually it was the penultimate day, the day before doom. This was what the President had been leading up to when he said shortly after four p.m. that he had only a few more hours to live. What he meant, and what he said a few minutes later, was that everybody was going to die. The end was due at midnight, Eastern Standard Time (nine p.m. Pacific Standard Time, five a.m. the next day London time, six a.m. Paris time, seven a.m. Mecca time, eight a.m. Moscow time) and so on around the poor doomed world.

The President had known for some weeks that the end was approaching. So had the State Department and, abroad, 10 Downing Street, the Quai D’Orsay, the Vatican and the Kremlin. Computers in all the capitals had been working at top speed, 24 hours a day, looking for a flaw, a way out, anything. The computers—Communist, neutral and Western—agreed there was no way out. There was nothing Earth could do to save itself.

Had it been a meteor, this extraterrestrial menace, something might have been done. Even a good-sized asteroid, having strayed out of orbit and into a collision course with Earth, could have been broken up into relatively small, harmless chunks that would burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere if the world powers cooperated in firing their space-age weapons at it.

But there was no way known of dispelling a cloud of noxious gas so huge it would envelop the Earth for 37 days, poisoning every breathing thing.

The evening papers put out their final editions and their staffs went home to their loved ones, went out to get drunk, went to holy places to pray. The Journal-American said:

WORLD ENDING

President, Pope,

Kremlin

Confirm Holocaust

NO WAY OUT FOR EARTH

Moon Flight Couple Also Doomed

The World-Telegram revealed the reasons behind the President’s resignation in favor of Orion Newcastle—the fact that during World War II, when both were unknown noncoms, the older man, though wounded, had dragged the younger one inch by inch through a minefield to an aid station and to the treatment there which had saved his life; and the fact that Newcastle had never again mentioned that incident, publicly or privately, in all the years since the war. A man of such courage and unselfishness, who, moreover, had been elected by the people to the second-highest office in the land, surely was entitled to be President, if at all possible, during the last several hours of his and the world’s existence—even if he was an incompetent buffoon.

The World-Telegram also found room for half a dozen human-interest stories. There was the one about the bank president who had been told confidentially by his friend the Secretary of the Treasury about the imminent end, and who had amused himself by taking a teller’s place and giving away vast sums of money, including a quarter million or so to a bank robber who had threatened to blow up the place with nitroglycerine but who obviously was an amateur with a little jar of water. There were the stories of the publisher who had given the beatnik poet a $15,000 advance on an impossible sheaf of nonverses, and of the partner in Tiffany’s who, pretending to be a clerk, had sold a little boy a seven-thousand-dollar necklace for a dollar fourteen.