Galaxy Magazine (April 1955) by Galaxy

Author:Galaxy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1955-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

We had to destroy the seed.

Marin was on the machine while Lee fed slugs of the fuel metal into the reactor. Marin was a capable man and so I was able to relieve the tension of the last few minutes before the trial by strolling out on the deck of the barge.

It was a beautiful day, the wind from out at sea keeping fall-out from the mainland at a minimum. Before me was the Staten Island shore, trees and

Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS

76

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

sheer bare heights at the water's edge; to my left was the shattered stalagmitic bed of New York. Even after all the decades, there was nothing green there. The rains that had washed the isotopes from Staten Island and watered its new growth of forest had hissed into steam on the island of Manhattan. It would be many decades before grass grew in its streets.

One of the workers in the Staten Island stockpile waved to me, a quarter of a mile across the water, and I waved back. They wished us well, there on the island. All three of us had spent the previous evening ashore with them and the conversation had been loud and long.

If we could succeed!

If we could reverse the clock!

So we drank our long, bitter toasts to success, and every man, woman and child in all the world toasted our efforts with us, all hundred and fifty thousand and more of them, for we all grew up in the ruins and the tradition of greatness and we knew what success would mean.

"Jom!" Lee called from behind me. "Jom, we're ready!"

I hurried into the workdeck. Lee was standing at the door, but without a word he went back to his station at the reactor, not daring to leave it too long. His

TARGET ONE

job, in some ways, was the most important of all. The reactor was tricky and dangerous and the K-mesons that powered the trial came only from a complicated fission-and-fusion reaction, hard to handle, deadly if it got out of control.

Marin was already setting up his coordinates. I looked over his shoulder at the whirling colors on the screen; it was nothing you could recognize. Not yet.

"I have the time now," Marin said absently, cracking a vernier a hair from its null position. "But the tri-di readings are hard. If we could have started out from Switzerland in the first place—"

"What Switzerland?" I asked. The slag-heap on the Alps would not be fit to move around in for centuries.

He said excitedly, "It's coming, Jom!" He froze one setting at Lausanne's elevation and dropped his hand to the range and deflection controls. Slowly the whirling began to make sense. We were watching a blur, and the blur smoothed out to become a racing mountainscape. We were flying over it, toward a city just appearing at the horizon. Marin kicked a floor switch and a translucent city map of Lausanne lighted up on the wall before him.

The screen seemed to drive across a lake, through a flicker-

ing thicket of buildings, and jerked to a halt inside an auditorium.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.