Norman Spinrad - The Iron Dream

Inside the chamber was naught but a single small instrument console behind which stood an ancient, wizened, crook-backed Dom with huge sunken black eyes and the evil broken grin of a ferret. This monstrosity was garbed in Zind gray set off with all manner of gold braid, precious jewels, and golden brightwork, giving the effect of some fetid rodent stuffed into a royal uniform as part of a particularly vile schoolboy prank.

Nevertheless, the dominance pattern exuded by the sordid brain of this grandfather of all Dominators was the most powerful Feric had ever felt. It was all he could do to keep from obeying the powerful impulse to toss away the Great Truncheon which ripped through his mind.

Behind him, he heard a great clatter of metal on stone as the High Commanders and the SS guard discarded their weapons at .the foul creature’s bidding—only Feric’s will was strong enough to resist this incredibly powerful Dominator, and even his muscles were frozen into immobility, paralyzed in the conflict of mighty wills between himself and the ancient Dom.

“Welcome human filth,” the Dominator croaked in a grisly dry parody of a human voice. “Needless to say, I’ve been expecting a visit. However, the presence of Feric Jaggar himself was too much to hope for. I shall enjoy watching your face, Jaggar, as the human genotype is wiped from the face of the earth for all time!”

The creature was clearly mad, somehow mistaking the final destruction of his own loathsome kind for that of true humanity! Feric threw every ounce of his will into the struggle to break the dominance pattern long enough to dash the wretch’s brains out with the Steel Commander, but succeeding in effecting only slight movement.

The Dominator threw a switch on the console before it, then laughed maniacally until a thin spittle sprayed from its leathery lips.

“Thus is sealed the fate of your worthless kind. Jaggar!” the old Dom cackled. “The activating signal has been sent to an installation of the ancients far to the east of here which our creatures have revived. In minutes, a huge nuclear explosion will take place in the wildlands, spewing millions of tons of radioactive dust into the air.

The ancients here built the device so that no enemy might survive their defeat. We were not able to restore it completely, but we’ve made it work well enough. In weeks, the atmosphere of the entire earth will be so contaminated that no human will ever breed true again. The wombs of even your precious purebreds will bring forth nothing but hunchbacked dwarfs, Parrotfaces, Blueskins, and dozens of new mutations, perhaps even our own kind. You have destroyed the Dominator Empire, and now we destroy humanity for all time! Die, human filth!”

An enormous flare of rage burned through Feric’s being, instantly breaking the dominance pattern as if it had never existed. He leapt forward swinging the Great Truncheon of Held, and brought the mighty weapon down on the skull of the drooling, cackling Dom, smashing it like a melon, spattering greasy gray brains everywhere, ripping clear through the creature’s torso, splitting it in half and spilling pulsing translucent organs all over the dank stone floor. \Vith another swipe, Feric dashed the instrument console to pieces, the force of his enraged blow burying the headpiece of his weapon in the floor below to a depth of nearly a foot.

With the death of the last Dom, the others were freed from the dominance pattern and all began babbling furiously at once.

“It can’t be!”

“The Fire!”

“The death of the human race!”

“They couldn’t—”

“Silence!” Feric roared, with tears in his eyes and a red-hot rage burning in his heart. “Stop this gibbering at once! Let us hasten to the surface and see if the foul creature uttered more than empty words before we mourn our race!”

When they reached the surface, the scene was as before: an endless vista of gray ash and smoldering rubble, through which the army of Heldon moved unopposed, finding nothing whatever alive.

Feric’s mood and that of his companions lightened somewhat as they stood in the open air once more, with nothing apparently amiss.

“I see no Fire of the Ancients, my Commander,” Best said.

“Bah, the old monster was simply mad,” Waning said, and Feric found himself agreeing with this estimate.

“Perhaps,” Bogel said uneasily, “but you yourself told us that the Doms were attempting to exhume the nuclear weapons of the ancients.”

This remark darkened the mood of the group once more, and Ferie realized that there was no point, one way or the other, in lingering in this grim place waiting for a catastrophe that might never come. He led the party back to the command car and continued with the tour of the ruined city as if nothing untoward had occurred.

For several minutes, the command car, with its motorcycle escort, drove on through the ashes, kicking up gray clouds, and sighting nothing. Feric and the others had refreshed themselves from the beer keg, and the mad Dom in his undergound chamber with his threats of nuclear destruction seemed quite improbable and unreal.

Suddenly the very sky seemed to explode; an enormous burst of light flashed into existence on the eastern horizon, a glare brighter than a thousand noonday suns that filled half the sky with its brilliance and leached the rest of all color.

Feric’s stomach filled with sickness even as he rubbed his nearly blinded eyes, for there was no mistaking such a thing for anything but the Fire of the Ancients. Moments later, the terrible, world-filling glare faded somewhat to reveal an enormous orange fireball ten times the apparent diameter of the sun hovering balefully over the eastern horizon.

Slowly, this enormous bubble of fire drifted upward, sucking a great boiling black cloud of rubble into the sky in its wake as it ascended. Moments later, the fiery, billowing cloud was fully formed and not a man within sight of it could fail to recognize the bone-chilling sight of the legendary ensign and dreaded incarnation of the Fire of the Ancients, the Mushroom Pillar Cloud.

No one could utter a word in the sight of this ghastly poisoned celestial toadstool. The size of the explosion and its power were beyond all human comprehension. There was no reason to doubt that the threat of the last Dominator had not been empty.

Many minutes later, the world was shattered by a clap of thunder that seemed to split the sky, that became an earthquake rumble without diminishing in intensity. At the same time, Feric felt the air smash at him with the force of a physical blow; the SS were swept off their motorcycles like so many scraps of paper, and the sturdy steel of the command car creaked and groaned.

The sighing, whining, roaring, hot caustic wind that followed seemed to Feric to be the last expiring breath of true humanity. He could all but feel the radioactive pestilence seeping into his germ plasm.

But even as the radioactive toadstool belched its genetic poison into the atmosphere of the earth, Feric Jaggar determined that the pure human genotype would survive because it must survive. Failure would not be tolerated from himself or anyone else. Humanity would be saved by a sheer act of will if need be. If a miracle were needed, every last Helder would be totally committed to bringing it about or to die trying.

In the grim days following the detonation of the monstrous final weapon of Zind, only the fanatic will of Feric Jaggar and the iron discipline of the Helder people kept all humanity from falling into despair and apathy. As the fetid cloud dispersed its poison throughout the atmosphere of the earth, many plants began to sicken and die, the young, the old, and the infirm broke out in horrid sores and pustules, and nearly two million true humans expired in agony.