now that they’ve got Moonbase and two of our spacecraft plants out of the way. The war is on, Karnes.”
Karnes acknowledged, they cut the connection.
There was one thing burning hotly in his brain. Brittain had fled New York without seeming to care how far they traced him or what kind of trail he left behind. Why?
He jerked open the door of the pilot’s cabin, and, not bothering to use the rail, launched himself toward the rear of the ship, flipping himself halfway down to land with his feet against the baggage room door. He pulled the door open and pushed inside.
Brittain was still groggy, so Karnes began slapping his face methodically, rocking his head from side to side.
“Okay! Okay! Stop it!” Brittain yelled, fully awake.
Karnes stopped, and Brittain blinked, owlishly. Karnes’ hunch factory was still operating at full blast; he was fairly sure that the lie he was about to tell would have all of the desired effect.
“You didn’t really think you could get away, did you, bud?” he asked, nastily. “We’re headed back for New York now, and you’ll stand trial for murder as well as sabotage and espionage.”
Brittain’s eyes widened in horror.
“What did that mind impressor tell you?” Karnes went on.
Brittain was trying to keep his mouth shut, but at that moment there was a glare of light which flashed bluely through the hard quartz of a nearby window.
From somewhere far to the north, another interceptor rocket had found the atomic warhead of an enemy bomb.
Brittain knew and recognized that flash. He screamed wordlessly and then began to sob like a hysterical child.
Karnes began to slap him again. “Come on, what was it?”
“Don’t—don’t let them go back to New York! It said—it said—” he gasped and took a deep breath “—WE’LL ALL BE KILLED!” he screamed.
“Why?” Karnes’s voice was cold.
“BOMB!” Brittain screamed again.
After a few more minutes of questioning, Karnes finally got the rest of the story from him.
The Galactics had found that on this date a nuclear bomb would get through the UN screen and completely destroy most of Greater New York. Only one other bomb would get through, but it would be thrown off course and land somewhere in the Pacific, having missed Los Angeles entirely.
“Anything else?” asked Karnes after a few seconds of silence from Brittain. “Didn’t it say they would have to prevent that?”
Brittain’s voice was dull now. “All it said was that the records would have to be preserved. It said that things must go on exactly as before. It said that nothing must interfere with the complete development, whatever that means.”
Karnes pushed his way out of the room and back towards the pilot’s compartment. What the pilot had to say was no news to Karnes.
“Radio from New York says that a bomb missed LA and hit the ocean. That was a close one.”
Karnes nodded silently, and leaned back in the stewardess’ seat to think.
No wonder Brittain had been so anxious to get out of New York.
New York would be destroyed, but that was inevitable. The thing that had bothered him, his dilemma, was solved.
Was this the real Earth that he lived in, or a museum that had been set up by the Galactics? If it was old Earth, then man would solve his present problems and go on to solve the problem of time travel and interstellar transportation. The present war would be just another little incident in the far past, like the battles of Gettysburg and Agincourt.
And if it were the museum Earth? No difference. For the Galactics had decided not to interfere. They had decided to let the race of Earth go on as it was—exactly as it had gone before. It made no difference, really. No difference at all. A perfect duplication of an original was the original, in every meaningful way.
“Funny,” said the pilot abruptly, “I’m not getting any signal from New York.”
Karnes took a deep breath and bit at his lower lip. But he did not look toward the horror that was New York. The city was gone, but the world was there—solid and real!
You’d better expand your museum a little bit, boys, he thought. We’ll need to include Mars and Venus before very long. And then the stars.
TIME FUZE (1954)
Commander Benedict kept his eyes on the rear plate as he activated the intercom. “All right, cut the power. We ought to be safe enough here.”
As he released the intercom, Dr. Leicher, of the astronomical staff, stepped up to his side. “Perfectly safe,” he nodded, “although even at this distance a star going nova ought to be quite a display.”
Benedict didn’t shift his gaze from the plate. “Do you have your instruments set up?”
“Not quite. But we have plenty of time. The light won’t reach us for several hours yet. Remember, we were outracing it at ten lights.”
The commander finally turned, slowly letting his breath out in a soft sigh. “Dr. Leicher, I would say that this is just about the foulest coincidence that could happen to the first interstellar vessel ever to leave the Solar System.”
Leicher shrugged. “In one way of thinking, yes. It is certainly true that we will never know, now, whether Alpha Centauri A ever had any planets. But, in another way, it is extremely fortunate that we should be so near a stellar explosion because of the wealth of scientific information we can obtain. As you say, it is a coincidence, and probably one that happens only once in a billion years. The chances of any particular star going nova are small. That we should be so close when it happens is of a vanishingly small order of probability.”
Commander Benedict took off his cap and looked at the damp stain in the sweatband. “Nevertheless, Doctor, it is damned unnerving to come out of ultradrive a couple of hundred million miles from the first star ever visited by man and have to turn tail and run because the damned thing practically blows up in your face.”
Leicher could see that Benedict was upset; he rarely used the same profanity twice in one sentence.
They had been downright lucky, at that. If Leicher hadn’t seen the star begin to swell and brighten, if he hadn’t known what it meant, or if Commander Benedict hadn’t been quick enough in shifting the ship back into ultradrive—Leicher had a vision of an incandescent cloud of gaseous metal that had once been a spaceship.
The intercom buzzed. The commander answered, “Yes?”
“Sir, would you tell Dr. Leicher that we have everything set up now?”
Leicher nodded and turned to leave. “I guess we have nothing to do now but wait.”
When the light from the nova did come, Commander Benedict was back at the plate again—the forward one, this time, since the ship had been
