Brian Aldiss - The Complete Short Stories - The 1950s

There was no error. The seventh planet was destroyed. Man never had any chance of detecting and blasting T and his eleven dark companions, for he had never discovered the mingled continuum in which they travelled. Their faint possibility of interception varied inversely with the distance they covered, for as they neared Man’s first galaxy, time was rolled back to when he had first spiralled tentatively up to the Milky Way. The machines bore in and back. It was growing early. The Koax by now was a young race without the secret of deep space travel, dwindling away across the other side of the universe. Man himself had only a few old-type fluid fuel ships patrolling half a hundred systems. T still lay in his fixed position, waiting. His two centuries of existence – the long wait – were almost ended. Somewhere in his cold brain was a knowledge that the climax lay close now. Not all of his few companions were as fortunate, for the machines, perfect when they set out, developed flaws over the long journey (the two hundred years represented a distance in space/time of some ninety-five hundred million light-years). The Koax were natural mathematical philosophers, but they had long ago given up as mechanics – otherwise they would have devised relay systems to manage the job that T had to do.

The nutrition feed in one machine slowly developed an increasing rate of supply, and the being died not so much from overeating as from growing pains – which were very painful indeed as he swelled against a steel bulkhead and finally sealed off the air vents with his own bulging flesh. In another machine, a valve blew, shorting the temporal drive; it broke through into real space and buried itself in an M-type variable sun. In a third, the guide system came adrift and the missile hurtled on at an increasing acceleration until it burned itself out and fried its occupant. In a fourth, the occupant went quietly and unpredictably mad, and pulled a little lever that was not then due to be pulled for another hundred years. His machine erupted into fiery, radioactive particles and destroyed two other machines as well.

When the Solar System was only a few light-years away, the remaining machines switched off their main drive and appeared in normal space/time. Only three of them had completed the journey, T and two others. They found themselves in a galaxy now devoid of life. Only the great stars shone on their new planets, fresh, comparatively speaking, from the womb of creation. Man had long before sunk back into the primeval mud, and the suns and planets were nameless again. Over Earth, the mists of the early Silurian Age hovered, and in the shallows of its waters molluscs and trilobites were the only expression of life. Meanwhile T concentrated on the seventh planet. He had performed the few simple movements necessary to switch his machine back into the normal universe; now all that was left for him to do was to watch a small pressure dial. When the machine entered the atmospheric fringes of the seventh planet, the tiny hand on the pressure dial would begin to climb. When it reached a clearly indicated line on the dial, T would turn a small wheel (this would release the dampers – but T needed to know the How, not the Why). Then two more gauges would begin to register. When they both read the same, T had to pull down the little lever. The speaker had explained it all to him regularly. What it did not explain was what happened after; but T knew very well that then Man would be destroyed, and that that would be good.

The seventh planet swung into position ahead of the blunt bows of T’s machine, and grew in apparent magnitude. It was a young world, with a future that was about to be wiped forever off the slate of probability. As T entered its atmosphere, the hand began to climb the pressure dial. For the first time in his existence, something like excitement stirred in the fluid of T’s brain. He neither saw nor cared for the panorama spreading below him, for the machine had not been constructed with ports. The dim instrument dials were all his eyes had ever rested on. He behaved exactly as the Koax had intended. When the hand reached the top, he turned the damper wheel, and his other two gauges started to creep. By now he was plunging down through the stratosphere of the seventh planet. The load was planned to explode before impact, for as the Koax had no details about the planet’s composition they had made certain that it went off before the machine struck and T was killed. The safety factor had been well devised. T pulled his last little lever twenty miles up. In the holocaust that immediately followed, he went out in a sullen joy.

T was highly successful. The seventh planet was utterly obliterated. The other two machines did less brilliantly. One missed the Solar System entirely and went on into the depths of space, a speck with a patiently dying burden. The other was much nearer target. It swung in close to T and hit the sixth planet. Unfortunately, it detonated too high, and that planet, instead of being obliterated, was pounded into chunks of rock that took up erratic orbits between the orbits of the massive fifth planet and the eighth, which was a small body encircled by two tiny moons. The ninth planet, of course, was quite unharmed; it rolled serenely on, accompanied by its pale satellite and carrying its load of elementary life forms.

The Koax achieved what they had set out to do. They had calculated for the seventh planet and hit it, annihilating it utterly. But that success, of course, was already recorded on the only chart they had had to go by. If they had read it aright, they would have seen … So, while the sixth was accidentally shattered, the seventh disappeared – Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, the Asteroid planet, T’s planet, Mars, Earth, Venus, Mercury – the seventh disappeared without trace.

On the ninth planet, the molluscs moved gently in the bright, filtering sunlight.

How infinitely soothing to the heart it was to be home. I began that evening with nothing but peace in me: and the evening itself jellied down over Africa with a mild mother’s touch: so that even now I must refuse myself the luxury of claiming any premonition of the disaster for which the scene was already set.

My half-brother, K-Jubal (we had the same father), was in a talkative mood. As we sat at the table on the veranda of his house, his was the major part of the conversation: and this was unusual, for I am a poet.

‘… because the new dam is now complete,’ he was saying, ‘and I shall take my days more easily. I am going to write my life story, Rog. G-Williams on the World Weekly has been pressing me for it for some time; it’ll be serialised, and then turned into audibook form. I should make a lot of money, eh?’

He smiled as he asked this; in my company he always enjoyed playing the heavy materialist. Generally I encouraged him: this time I said: ‘Jubal, no man in Congo States, no man in the world possibly, has done more for people than you. I am the idle singer of an idle day, but you – why, your good works lie about you.’

I swept my hand out over the still bright land.

Mokulgu is a rising town on the western fringes of Lake Tanganyika’s northern end. Before Jubal and his engineers came here, it was a sleepy market town, and its natives lived in the indolent fashion of their countless forefathers. In ten years, that ancient pattern was awry; in fifteen, shattered completely. If you lived in Mokulgu now, you slept in a bed in a towering nest of flats, you ate food unfouled by flies and you moved to the sound of whistles and machinery. You had at your black fingertips, in fact, the benefits of what we persist in calling ‘Western civilisation’. If you were more hygienic and healthy – so ran the theory – you were happier.