Doom and the Destroyer
The Destroyer was visible to anyone with the courage to look at it.
It filled most of the sky, blocking out the entire Universe beyond. It stretched from the horizon up to the zenith and beyond, giving the impression of being a titanic concavity.
Its swirling cloud belts looked like ribbons of varicoloured paints, which had been swirled into a cosmic sea and then stirred by the finger of a god. They curled over and around one another, forming a kaleidoscopic medley of mind-bending complexity. There were uncountable curling streams of vivid luminescence; some twisting around each other; some breaking into finer and finer tributaries; some fading away; some combining into mighty flows whose giddy fluctuations were obvious to the unaided human eye.
But there was no unaided human eye to stare in trembling awe at the Destroyer. Indeed, there were not many human eyes in existence; unaided or not.
Maya shuddered as she looked at the representation of the Destroyer on the monitor screen. In a deep, still somewhat disinterested, stratum of her mind, it occurred to her the vast panorama was eerily reminiscent of the paintings of Turner’s last years. There was the same misty numinous quality to the scene, the same sense of something tremendous hidden by veils of intricate cloudscapes.
However, the image was clearly not a painting as it shuddered and flickered in its frame while dazzling white flashes periodically dazzled her as they shot across the screen.
Professor DeGroot was beside her.
‘Switch it off, Maya,’ he said, in the voice of a man whose courage trembled on the point of collapsing, ‘we’re too deep in the magnetosphere now. Relativistic electrons are scouring the surface. Their energies must be in the high tens of mega electron-volts by now, and the bombardment will only get worse. Why stare at the damn thing—we know what it looks like! We’ve been watching it approach for years, haven’t we!’
She nodded, glad someone had made the decision for her, and a slim finger sent the screen into blackness.
It was never to show an image again.
She turned from the silent monitor and looked at her fellow scientists.
They were mainly sitting, as the seismic shocks were now so intense and frequent that standing took constant concentration. She and DeGroot had been two of those brave souls, but she gladly moved to the nearest vacant chair. A powerful quake hit at that instant and momentarily the entire room and its occupants became an indecipherable blurred image of meaningless shapes.
Cries of anger and surprise came from the group but not too much fear: they were beyond the most obvious manifestations of fear now. The quakes and the rising heat were familiar now; invisible tormentors to which they had become accustomed.
Her image of the room stabilised, and she could discern their features again.
A small burst of pride rose in her thoughts as she regarded them: McQuade, Duquesne, Takemoto, Hilbert.
Their faces, man and woman, were drawn, exhausted, lacking the slightest show of joy, of contentment. They were facing the greatest threat in the history of humanity, but they had accepted their fate—whatever that should be.
Veronica McQuade looked across at DeGroot, tightly holding her chair arms to keep herself from tumbling to the floor.
Maya smiled sadly as she stared at the woman.
McQuade was a brilliant scientist and it was she who had found a way of stabilising the time crystal, and yet it meant nothing: she was as insignificant and helpless as the humblest rodent before the might of the Destroyer.
And now she asked the question which everyone else had wanted to ask but somehow had been unable to arrange their lips into the necessary shapes.
‘How long?’
DeGroot lowered himself slowly onto a chair.
He looks like an old man! Maya thought, but was instantly ashamed of herself.
That was unfair. The horror of their situation had aged them all. She did not know what face she now presented to the world. The days of caring for appearance were long since gone. All the things that had seemed important—fashion, cosmetics, hairstyle—all dead and buried.
Like most of the human race.
Except for the “buried” part.
‘I’ve had no more communications from Cheyenne Mountain,’ he said in a dry monotone. He was looking at his hands rather than McQuade. ‘The decision will be mine. And mine alone.’
‘And?’
‘One hour’s time. We may as well make it a round number.’
There was a sudden susurration in the room, a dry whispering from people who had known it was coming but had not known the time. Now they did, and there would be no more wondering.
Maya found she needed to ask for reassurance; to have an older, wiser adult tell her things would be fine. But when she finally spoke, she said, ‘What are our chances?’
DeGroot did not look at her.
‘The time crystal will stabilise the quantum computations. Its periodicity is good for several millennia. We have Veronica to thank for that.’
‘I know all about the time crystal. That’s not what I asked.’
Now DeGroot did look at her.
‘I can tell you what our chances are if we don’t do it—zero. Nothing. The surface will soon be fused into glowing slag; irradiated glowing slag. We must assume we are the last representatives of humanity on the surface, the very last. I’ve had no contact with the base in Australia for two days.’
There was a communal intake of breath at that revelation: he hadn’t told them until then. Grimly, he continued, ‘We all know about the lightsail project for saving a remnant of our species. I must tell you, I strongly believe that not one of those craft will survive that vast journey.’
‘What about the Burrowers?’ McQuade said, ‘they have a chance, don’t they?’
DeGroot’s mouth thinned into a tight line. ‘Perhaps. A very slim one. It all depends on how the mantle rocks react to the gravitational strains. There’s no telling what they will do to the thermal profile. I wouldn’t like to make an estimate of the probability of survival of those idiots. There is one sure hope for rebuilding after the passage, and that is the Space Arks out in the asteroid belt. My brother is a man of action; of incredible resourcefulness. He won’t fail us. All the arks contain the genotypes of all our most important plants and animals in DNA form, adjusted for the arctic conditions we expect to obtain on the transplanted Earth.’
But Maya wanted yet more reassurance, more hope. ‘That’s very good to hear, Professor, but what about us? To be reconstituted like dried soup. It’s impossible! It’s never been done before!’
‘Obviously not with people. But the science is clear, and animal experiments have had a forty percent success rate. And there is no compulsion if you don’t want to participate.’
Maya’s head dropped. She and her colleagues were being asked to make decisions of greater weight than anyone had ever been asked before. How could the human brain contemplate what lay ahead and stay sane!
She lifted her head.
‘Forgive me, Professor, I know we’ve been through this hundreds of times. I knew what I was signing up for. It’s—it’s just now it’s so close. So damned close!’
To her surprise, he crossed to her over the shuddering floor and put a hand on her shoulder.
To her greater surprise, she burst into tears.
‘It’s the same for all of us, Maya. There will be a sleep. A dreamless sleep. But when the computer decides the environment is safe, we will awake.’
‘If the computer itself stays sane in the ages to come.’
‘The time crystal will keep it sane. Its patterns will repeat over and over in an unchanging sequence. It will not fail.’
‘We hope.’
She looked up into his lined, exhausted face and saw an expression she had not seen it produce before.
He smiled.
‘Yes, Maya, we hope. That something can be salvaged from this cataclysm. A catastrophe we all are innocent of causing.’ He reached for her arm and pulled it, very gently. ‘Let’s go.’
Takemoto stood and faced them.
‘I’m sorry, I can’t do it. I won’t do it.’
No attempt was made to dissuade him; he had made his decision and there was no time left to argue.
All the other occupants of the room rose as one and walked to the recording room; there the hour of preparation passed—all too quickly.
There they lay on the couches, and the transparent sides rose around them, confining them within strange chrysalises. Some looked alarmed at their confinement, and Hilbert tried to escape, before realising the futility of such actions, and subsided with his eyes tightly closed.
The headsets gently attached themselves to the craniums and zettabytes of data were transcribed and transferred to imperishable, indestructible media.
When the transfer was complete, an invisible gas killed them humanely, painlessly, and so swiftly they had no awareness of their passing. Thus, they were spared the terrors ravaging the surface.
The bodies were then instantly cremated.
The great machines swung into long-planned action, programmed to deny the Destroyer the destruction of the last hopes of a species on the edge of extermination.
The recording room immediately began to descend into the shaft which had opened up beneath it. But just before the descent had picked up speed, one particularly energetic charged particle ploughed a path through the sheltering stone and scored a direct hit on the time crystal. Thousands of such particles had previously passed to the sides of the recording room or had spent their energies many metres above it. This one, however, lay on the extreme positive tail of the energy distribution and it was neither deflected nor absorbed in the intervening layers.
Down the recording room swept, kilometre after kilometre; down, down into the crust of the planet, until it was below the shudderings and splinterings of the tormented rock. Below it and, ever increasingly above it, was the escape shaft, long planned for this exact moment. Made from reinforced, incorruptible fluorocarbon polymers, it would bend and twist under the seismic stresses, but would not break, could not break, and when the Destroyer’s fury had finally passed, it would slowly bend back into its original shape.
The room finished its seemingly endless plunge and settled gently into the void that had long been prepared for it.
Then, far above, mighty cubic kilometres of ferroconcrete were blasted into place, sealing the room from the hell that was gathering its horrors above it. Ferroconcrete that would retain its durability, its strength, for three short centuries, but then begin to disintegrate into sand.
The quantum computer, now stabilised by McQuade’s time crystal, began its vigil.
A long vigil.
Above the now quiescent recording room, the Destroyer wreaked its worst.
Oceans evaporated like drops of water on a red-hot griddle.
Mountains were flung down as if they were pitiful mounds of dust, and their ashes tossed into darkening skies.
