Authors: Hubbard,L. Ron
It must have been night outside, but nothing could be darker than the deep guts of this ancient defense base. The black seemed to press in upon them as though possessed of actual weight. The miner’s lamps were darting shafts through ink.
They had come down a ramp, gone through an air-sealed door, and found an enormous cavern. The sign said
“Heliport.” The time-decayed bulks of collapsed metal that stood along the walls had been some kind of planes, planes with large fans on top. Jonnie had seen pictures of them in the man-books: they were called “helicopters.” He stared at the single one sitting in the middle of the vast floor.
The small party of Scots with him were interested in something else. The doors! They were huge, made of metal, reaching far right and far left and up beyond their sight. Another entrance to the base- a fly-in entrance for their type of craft.
Angus was scrambling around some motors to the side of the doors. “Electrical. Electrical! I wonder if these poor lads ever thought there would be a day when you had to do something manually. What if the power failed?”
“It’s failed,” said Robert the Fox, his low voice booming in the vast hangar.
“Call me the lamp boys,” said Angus. And presently the two Scots who were packing lamps, batteries, wires, and fuses for their own lighting trotted down the ramp, pushing their gear ahead of them on a dolly they had found.
Hammering began over by the motors that operated the doors.
Robert the Fox came over to Jonnie. “If we can get those doors to open and close we can fly in and out of here. There’s a sighting port over there and it shows the outside looks like a cave opening, overhung, not visible to the drone.”
Jonnie nodded. But he was looking at the center helicopter. The air was different here; he could feel it on his hands. Drier. He went over to the helicopter.
Yes, there was his eagle. With arrows in its claws, dim but huge on the side of this machine. Not like the other machines, which had minor insignia. He made out the letters: “President of the United States.” This was a special plane!
The historian answered his pointing finger. “Head of the country. Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.”
Jonnie was puzzled. Yes, possibly he had gotten here on that day of disaster a thousand or more years ago. But if so, where was he? There had been no such sign on the offices. He walked around the hangar. Ha! There was another elevator, a smaller one in a different place. He looked further and found a door to a stairwell that led upward. The door was hard to open, apparently air-sealed. He got through it and mounted upward. Behind him the hammer and clang of the group faded and died. There was only the soft pat of his feet on the stairs.
Another air-sealed door at the top, even harder to open.
This was an entirely different complex. It stood independent of the rest of the base. And due to dry air and seals and possibly something else, the bodies were not dust. They were mummified. Officers on the floor, slumped over desks. Only a few.
Communication and file rooms. A briefing room with few chairs. A bar with glasses and bottles intact. Very superior grade of furnishings. Carpets. All very well preserved. Then he saw the door symbol he was looking for and went in.
The sign was on the splendid polished desk. A huge eagle plaque on the wall. A flag, with some of its fabric still able to stir when he caused a faint breeze opening the door.
The man was slumped over the desk, mummified. Even his clothing still looked neat.
Jonnie looked under the parchment hand and without touching it slid out the sheaf of papers.
The top date and the hour were two days later than the ones that ended in the operations room in the other complex.
The only explanation Jonnie could think of was that the ventilation systems didn’t join: when gas hit the main base, the system was turned off here. And they had not dared turn it back on.
The president and his staff had died from lack of air.
Jonnie felt strangely courteous and respectful as he removed more papers from the desk and trays. He held in his hands the last hours of the world, report by report. Even pictures and something from high up called “satellite pictures.”
He hastily skimmed through the reports to make sure he had it all.
A strange object had appeared over London without any trace of where it came from.
Teleportation, filled in Jonnie.
It had been at an altitude of 30,000 feet.
Important, thought Jonnie.
It had dropped a canister and within minutes the south of England was dead.
Psychlo gas. The myths and legends.
It had cruised eastward at 302.6 miles per hour.
Vital data, thought Jonnie.
It had been attacked by fighter planes from Norway; it had not fought back; it had been hit with everything they had without the slightest evidence of damage to it.
Armor, thought Jonnie.
An interchange on something called the “hotline” prevented a nuclear missile exchange between the United
States and Russia.
The “Don’t fire; it isn’t the Russians” message on the desk in the other complex, thought Jonnie.
It was hit with nuclear weapons over Germany without the slightest apparent damage.
No pilots, thought Jonnie. It was a drone. No breathe-gas in it. Very heavy motors.
It had then toured the major population centers of the world, dropping canisters and wiping out populations.
And wiped out the other complex of this base without even knowing or caring that it was there, thought Jonnie. On the operations map of the other complex, they had plotted it only just to the east of this location.
It then went on to obliterate the eastern part of the United States. The reports had come in from “Dew Line” stations in the Arctic and some parts of Canada. It continued on its almost leisurely way to wipe out all population centers in the southern hemisphere. But at this point something else began to happen. Isolated observers and satellites reported tanks of a strange design materializing one after the other in various parts of the world and mopping up fleeing hordes of human beings.
Stage two; teleportation, thought Jonnie.
Military reports, out of sequence and incomplete, were shuffled in with the reports of the tanks. All major military airfield installations, whether gassed out of existence or not, were being blown to bits by strange, very fast flying craft.
Battle planes teleported in at the same time as the tanks.
Reports of some tanks exploding, some battle planes exploding. Reasons not known.
Manned craft, thought Jonnie. Breathe-gas hitting areas of radiation caused by firing on the drone with nuclear weapons.
The drone spotted by satellite landing near Colorado City, Colorado. Causes most structures there to collapse.
Preset remote control, thought Jonnie. Even their central command minesite had been picked out. Whole area carefully plotted and observed by casting picto-recorders. Rough, uncontrolled landing of drone near preplanned command area.
Tank spotted by satellite shooting at pocket of cadets wearing flight oxygen masks at the Air Force Academy. Report by acting commander of corps of cadets. Then no further communication.
The last battle, thought Jonnie.
Efforts from the com room to contact somebody, anybody, anywhere, via a remote antenna located three hundred miles to the north. Antenna location bombed by enemy battle plane.
Radio tracking, thought Jonnie.
Unspotted, but with their air shut off, the president and his aides and staff had lasted two more hours until they died of asphyxiation.
Jonnie put the papers respectfully in a protecting mine bag.
Feeling a bit strange for speaking, he said to the corpse, “I’m sorry no help came. We’re something over a thousand years late.” He felt very bad.
His gloom would have followed him as he left the dreary, dark, cold quarters had not the barking, cheery voice of Dunneldeen sprung from the radio at his belt. Jonnie halted and acknowledged.
“Jonnie, laddie!” said Dunneldeen. “You can stop worrying yourself about scraping uranium out of the dirt! There’s a full nuclear arsenal, complete with assorted bombs, intact, just thirty miles north of here! We found the map and a plane just checked it out! Now all we’ve got to worry about is blowing off our innocent little heads and exploding this whole planet in the bargain!”
Disaster struck in the form of an earthquake on Day 32 of the new year.
Shortly after midnight, the tremor awakened Jonnie. Equipment on his bureau in the London Palace Elite Hotel rattled together and he sat up in his bed. The prolonged throb of vibration was still occurring!
The old building groaned.
The rumble of the earthquake traveled on. It was followed by a second, lesser tremor a half-minute later, and then that was gone.
It was not too unusual in the Rockies. No damage seemed to be done in the old mining town.
Uneasy, but not really alarmed, Jonnie pulled on buckskin pants and moccasins and, throwing a puma skin over his shoulders, sprinted through the snow to the Empire Dauntless.
The duty sentry’s light was on. The young Scot was tapping a buzzer key that activated the communication system to the mine: it was a directional laser radio, limited to an exact width and undetectable beyond these mountains.
The Scot looked up. His face was a bit white. “They don’t answer.” He tapped the key again more rapidly as though his finger by itself could shoot the beam through. “Maybe the receiver pole got twisted in the quake.”
In minutes, Jonnie had a relief crew routed out, spare ropes and winches assembled, blankets and stimulants packaged and being loaded on the passenger plane. Strained faces turned repeatedly toward the mine even though it was far out of their line of sight. They were worried for the mine duty shift: Thor, a shift leader named Dwight, and fifteen men.
The night was black as coal; even the stars were masked by high, invisible clouds. It was no mean stunt flying these mountains in the dark. The instruments of the mine plane glowed green as the ship vaulted upward. The image screen painted a blurred picture of the terrain ahead. Jonnie adjusted it to sharpness. Beside him a copilot made some console plane weight corrections. Jonnie was depending on his eyes to avoid the first mountain slope. He flipped on the plane’s beam lights. They struck the snow slope and he eased the plane up over it.
He knew that things had been going too well.
They had been making real progress in their preparations. They were far from ready, but what they had accomplished had been miraculous.
He hunted ahead for the next mountainside, checking the viewscreen. Good lord, it was dark! He checked his compass. The men in the back were tense and silent. He could almost feel what they were thinking.
The top knolled flipped by under them. A little too close. Where was the next one?
The assault rifles he had at first considered worthless were proving the very thing. With a great deal of ingenuity they had salvaged the ammunition. They had drawn out the bullets from the case and tapped out the primer. By careful experimentation they had found out how to substitute a blasting cap in the bottom of the shell case. At first they had thought they would also need powder and had blown up a rifle trying it- no casualties. It turned out that the blasting cap was enough to fire a bullet at high velocity.
Jonnie swerved the plane to avoid a suddenly looming cliff and went a little higher. If he went too high he could lose his way entirely if lights were out at the mine. His lights might also become visible at the compound. Stay low. Dangerous, but stay low.
Then they had taken the bullets and drilled a small hole in the nose and, wearing radiation suits, inserted a grain of radioactive material from a TNW. They had covered this with a thin bit of melted lead. In this way a man could carry the ammunition without danger of radiation hitting him.
But when it was fired, oh my! They tried it on breathe-gas in a glass bottle, and did that breathe-gas explode!
Too low, Jonnie had recognized a lone scrub on a ridge. He lifted the plane over it. They were on course. Hold down the speed. Don’t have another disaster flying in the dark.
The bullets were also armor-piercing to some degree and, when fired into a breathe-gas vial two hundred yards away, caused a violent reaction that brought concussion all the way back to them.
They put every available Scot onto an assembly line converting bullets and they had cases and cases of them now.
A hundred assault rifles and five hundred magazines had been cleaned to perfection. They fired without a stutter or dud.
No good against a tank or a thick, lead-glass compound dome, but those assault rifles would be deadly to individual Psychos. With breathe-gas in their blood streams they would literally explode.
He spotted the river that ran out of the gorge. He eased down, following it, the plane’s lights flashing on the uneven ice and snow.
They’d been so happy about the assault rifles that they had gone to work on the bazookas. They had found some nuclear artillery shells and had converted their noses over to the bazooka noses, and now they had armor-piercing, nuclear bazookas. There were still a number of those left to make.
Yes, it had been too smooth, too good to be true.
There were no lights on the mine pad ahead.
There was no one visible there at all.
He set the plane down on the pad. The passengers boiled out of it. Their lights darted this way and that.
One of them who had run to the chasm edge called back, his voice thin in the cold darkness: “Jonnie! The cliff face has gone!”