COUNTDOWN
BY JULIAN F. GROW
The moment is at hand—the fingers
are poised—this is what comes next!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1963.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
10 years of uneasy peace, since the Hour of Tragedy ... tenapprehensive, uneasy years pungent with fear, with hatred, distrust ...ten years like ten thousand in the past of man ... ten units out of theinfinite, out of time the eternal, immutable, nonexistent dimension....
9 planets spinning ... nine spawn of the sun, one of them nascent, ahairsbreadth from its heritage. But which heritage? It could choose.The fertile warmth of the parent star ... or the star's pure fire?
8 periods, in the gibberish of the sifters of chaos ... eight:Pre-Cambrian to Triassic—while flame cooled and became stone and laylatent, lambent, pent awaiting release—before from the fetid Jurassicdarknesses the beasts of warm blood crawled.
7 seas, once the womb of life, then too long its caul ... the commonbirthplace, then a strangling wall between. (Once too, briefly ahigh road for the courageous, now a new kind of night for marauders,shadowed shapes armed with pieces of the sun.)
6 masses of land, cradles for the genesis of a myriad species ...and one of them Man. Man the Creator, the Protector, the Destroyer:builder of shrines, burner of saints, good father, good soldier, goodkiller.... Man, the creature of choice.
5 nations remaining, sparse ruddy fruit of a thousand wars, nurtured bya billion dead. Five, the bloody consequence of union into pack, intotribe, into fief, to kingdom, empire and nation. The threads of historygathered finally into five flags, entwined in alliance at this point intime by a searing wind: Pan-American, Sino-Russian, Afro-Arabian ...racial armies, sons of the first beast to kill from anger, fathers ofthe unborn. Armies in the terrible truce of the fusion bomb ... waiting.
4 farflung networks: metal wire and machines, and vacuum. Interlinkedwebs of detection and retaliation or attack, within the webs bombs ...within the bombs targets, mapped and doomed by a spark. Each alliancea network of aimed and armed missiles, in deserts, on mountaintops,hidden deep and in the surrounding seas. Each alliance a pattern oftargets, always an instant from obliteration.
(Such had come to Britain in its Hour of Tragedy when the last savagehope of Empire Regained dissolved into vapor, and the Isles becameslag. There the fourth network corroded under a shroud of ash; but thesurviving three ceaselessly hummed.)
3 men, of one species but riven somehow at this point in time bypigment, tongue and details of dress: a man from Brownsville, a manfrom Vladivostok, a man from Khartoum ... buried deep in the heartsof the networks, each already entombed, and so safe from death. Eachchosen by his masters to be the nock of the arrow, the final factor;yet not an arrow, for each network of course was aimed at both theothers. A moment's trust is fatal once the truce is broken, the mastersreasoned, and so the bombs and the men were trained.
2 buttons, a choice under the fingers of each of these men: one, red,to loose deliberately the double pronged torrent of bombs if themasters so decreed. The other, white, to cancel the launching commandbroadcast automatically