The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

Only an elite few had known the truth before the President’s announcement but the truth had trickled down among the influential, moneyed group, enabling many who had never before considered playing the role to become philanthropists in various ways, either for the honest fun of it, or because of the good will this presumably would lay up for them in the next world, if any.

Oh, about that moon flight couple. They were a cosmonaut and a cosmonette, so-called, Russian. They were doomed like the rest of humanity, Tass explained unhappily, because the killer cloud would envelop the moon as well as the Earth and the space between them.

Let’s get back to our man on the Times, Andy Grey, struggling with syntax in his attempt to write today’s story from tomorrow’s mythical (because nonexistent) point of view. To put it another way, he was trying to manipulate the language so his story would look back as honestly as possible, from a day that wouldn’t exist, on the events of Earth’s last day.

Yet his story could not be 100% positive.

The first edition appeared at ten p.m. and there was always the possibility, however slight, that something might happen between press time and midnight to change everything. Theoretically it was an impossible story to write. Actually, though, it could be done if it were sufficiently hedged, with enough loopholes left.

Andy Grey rolled another sheet of copy paper into his typewriter, lit another cigarette (at least lung cancer would never touch him now) and tried again to write a lead that would, as they say, “stand up” through all editions, both those that came out tonight and those printed, or due to be printed, tomorrow.

The world came to an end yesterday. Of course you couldn’t say that. If it had, there’d be no one left to write such a sentence.

The Earth was due to be destroyed last night, the top international scientists agreed. Said when? Last night, presumably. But the concept of “last night” cannot exist unless there is a “today” to look back from. Thus, if the world had ended last night, there could be no today and the sentence, designed to be read by today-people, was nonsense.

There will be no today, despite the date on this newspaper. Never in The New York Times —too whimsical!

It could have been done entirely with out-of-town datelines like Washington, London and Moscow—there were plenty of such stories already in type under “yesterday’s” date—but the publisher and president of the paper had decided that the overall lead had to be an undated one, so-called, written from the point of view of the date of the newspaper: “today,” meaning tomorrow.

Andy Grey crumpled up his umpteenth piece of copy paper and lit his next cigarette, reflecting that the problems posed by European Press in bygone days were pikers compared to his present dilemma.

A copy boy brought Andy the first editions of “tomorrow’s” tabloid, the Daily News, which came out two hours earlier than the Times.

“END NIGH,” the Daily News said in its biggest, thickest headline type. Before pursuing this to p. 3, where the story was, Grey turned to the center fold minus one, to see what the editorial said. Typically colloquial, it was headed “SO LONG, EVERYBODY,” and went on:

We hear we’re wasting our time writing this editorial for a paper that won’t hit the stands today (which is really tomorrow to us—that is, the man writing this), but there’s an old show-business adage which, adapted to our business, applies here: the paper must come out if it’s at all possible.

We naturally greet the news of our impending doom, and yours, as so dramatically described by our Washington man on page 3, with mixed emotions . . .

Grey envied the News its easy, colloquial approach to doomsday. Inside was a sidebar under these encouraging words: “RELIGIOUS LEADERS PLEDGE HEREAFTER.”

None of this was of any help to Grey. He was well into his fourth pack when the boy came up with the Herald Tribune, which had obviously advanced its publication time. The Trib, which had been livelying itself up these many years, much to the Times’ annoyance, had put all its columnists on the front page, as if to assuage the grief of its readership by showing them that Walter Lippmann, John Crosby, David Lawrence, Judith Crist and Art Buchwald were going, too. Each had something wise, funny, wry or profound to say about the putative end of the world. Donald I. Rogers, the financial editor, was not on the front page but his comment was summarized there, in the Topic A column. He said, in part, “If these words are read today, I predict the biggest, best, bull-est day Wall Street has ever had!!!” (Exclamation points his.)

The Trib’s headline, all-encompassing in its simplicity, said: “NO TOMORROW?”

That question mark, after the word which so magnificently ignored the petty journalistic fetish of yesterday-today-tomorrow by transmuting itself into its metaphorical sense—meaning, loosely, the future—was the despair of every other newspaper editor in New York and, eventually, the world.

Because, of course, the world did not end.

There had been a mistake by the computers, which had been operating on old data, fed to them by old programmers, who had got their stuff from old scientists.

Had it been 1900 when the noxious cloud touched Earth, or even 1930, mankind, not to speak of animalkind, bird-kind, fishkind and insectkind, would have perished instanter. But, in the years between, Earthmen had contaminated their atmosphere with radiation, automobile exhaust, DDT and other anti-insect sprays, smokestack exhaust, cigarette, cigar and pipe smoke, autumn weed smoke from the proliferating suburbs and multifarious miscellaneous contaminants. It was this unwholesome combination, called by some the “Rachel Carson effect,” which saved Earth.

The whole shemozzle, as Buchwald later called it, was far more poisonous than the petty little toxic-cloud menace alleged to have been threatening the planet.

What had happened was that humanity, little by little over the decades, had built up immunities to the various poisons it was forced to live with and ingest. The cumulative immunity was a fantastically powerful one which it would have taken a real hoopdinger of a menace, as Earl Wilson was to put it, to outdo.

Thus Earth lived—as recorded in an Associated Press flash sent (by who knows what group of dedicated newsmen) at 12:01 a.m. EST. It said, simply, “FLASH—EARTH LIVES,” and there were an awful lot of bells ringing on the teletype machines. UPI was only about half a minute behind with its own realization that another day had begun.

Consternation reigned, of course. There was a bull market, as the Trib’s Don Rogers predicted.

There was also a lot of panic in high places as the bosses who had given it away went crazy trying to get it back. And an awful lot of people, from President Orion Newcastle to little Billy Boyce, weren’t giving up a thing.

Certain qualities are essential to the good newsman: a capacity for accurate and detailed research; a feeling for the “human angle”; and just that touch of precognition (all right, call it hunch—or even extrapolation) that tells him where to turn for the next story.

Arthur Clarke, somehow, has never been a newsman: physicist, mathematician, astronomer, inventor, skin-diver, treasure-hunter, lecturer and teacher, he has been editor, author, journalist, encyclopaedist, and (most recently) scenarist. (By the time you read this, the two-way Clarke-(Strangelove) Kubrick collaboration, 2001: A Space Odyssey, should be in print in book form, and ready for release on film.)