He laughed. Coming to an end. Mankind and the Others, together, coming to the ultimate and complete end of everything.
"How much longer?" he asked the computer. "How long do we have?"
The computer's lights flashed once, twice, then went dark. The viewscreen was dead.
Holman stared at the machine. He looked around the compartment. One by one the outside viewscreens were flickering, becoming static-streaked, weak, and then winking off.
"They're taking over the ship!"
With every ounce of willpower in him, Holman concentrated on the generators and engines. That was the important part, the crucial system that spelled the difference between victory and defeat. The ship had to keep moving!
He looked at the instrument panels, but their soft luminosity faded away into darkness. And now it was becoming difficult to breathe. And the heating units seemed to be stopped. Holman could feel his life-warmth ebbing away through the inert metal hull of the dying ship.
But the engines were still throbbing. The ship was still streaking across space and time, heading towards a rendezvous with the infinite.
Surrender.
In a few moments you will be dead. Give up this mad fight and die peacefully,
The ship shuddered violently. What were they doing to it now?
Surrender!
"Go to hell," Holman snapped. "While there's breath in me, I'll spend it fighting you."
You cannot escape.
But now Holman could feel warmth seeping into the ship.
He could sense the painful glare outside as billions of galaxies all rushed together down to a single cataclysmic point in spacetime.
"It's almost over!" he shouted. "Almost finished. And you've lost! Mankind is still alive, despite everything you've thrown at him. AH of mankind-the good and the bad, the murderers and the music, wars and cities and everything we've ever done, the.whole race from the beginning of time to the end-all locked up here in my skull. And I'm stil! here. Do you hear me? I'm still here!" The Others were silent,
Holman could feel a majestic rumble outside the ship, like distant thunder,
"The end of the world. The end of everything and everybody. We finish in a tie. Mankind has made it right down to the final second. And if there's another universe after this one, maybe there'll be a place in it for us all over again. How's that for laughs?"
The world ended.
Not with a whimper, bat a roar of triumph.
Part 2. Sun Destroyed
What if the Universe continues on its peaceful way, but it is our Sun that is somehow destroyed? That would be a "Catastrophe of the Second Class."
In the prescientific age, it was felt that the Sun was not reliable. In the Norse myths, the Sun and Moon were forever pursued by wolves who might swallow them at any time. In the Greek myths, an unskilled hand at the reins of the solar chariot sent the Sun careening toward the Earth and nearly destroyed it. Science knows better. The Sun is stable-but is it? Do we know enough? Can it destroy us willfully, unpre-dictably ("Judgement Day" by Lloyd Biggie, Jr.)?
Well, perhaps not willfully, unpredictably-but inevitably. The Sun cannot last forever. In the 1840s, Hermann von Helmholtz worked out the law of conservation of energy, and that in itself, told us the Sun had a finite life and must die ("The Custodian" by William Tenn)-but not for billions of years, we believe.
The manner of that death has changed since Helmholtz's day. For nearly a century, it was taken for granted that the Sun was, one way or anqther, a huge bonfire that would flicker, die down and cool. It would take longer for the Sun to do so than an ordinary bonfire but it was just as inevitable ("Phoenix" by Clark Ashton Smith).
By the 1930s, however Hans A. Bethe and Carl von Weizsacker had worked out the details of the nuclear fires of the Sun and it began to seem that our luminary would go out in a deadly blaze rather than a pitiful flicker ("Run from the Fire" by Harry Harrison).
Judgement Day
by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
Lem Dyer was used to being talked about. For years people had thought him a bit touched in the head, or a harmless dreamer, or maybe some kind of soothsayer, and in Glenn Center when folks thought something they said it. Lem never minded.
They were saying other things about Mm that evening, foul, vicious things. Lem heard some of them, spewed up from the crowd that gathered below his cell window. He tilted the battered old chair baek against the cement-block wall and sat there in the dark, puffing slowly on his corncob pipe and only half listening to the arguments, and the coarse shouts, and the jeers. "Shucks," he told himself, "They don't mean nothin' by it."
And after a while he heard the sheriff's booming voice talking to the crowd, telling the men to go home, telling them they had -nothing to worry about, and they might as well leave Lem Dyer alone with his conscience.
"He'll hang at sunrise, just as sure as there'll be a sunrise," Sheriff Harbson said. "Now go on home and get to bed. You don't want to oversleep, do you?"
There was more talk, and then the men drifted away, and things got quiet, The sheriff came back in the jail and barred the front door, and Lem heard him talking to the deputies, allowing that Lem Dyer might or might not be the things people said he was, but he sure was an odd one.
"Going to hang in the morning," the sheriff said, "and he's sitting back there in his cell smoking his pipe just like he always used to do out in his shack, of an evening. To look at him you'd think nothing had happened-or was going to happen."
Lem chuckled softly to himself. The sheriff was a good man. He'd gone out of his way to make Lem comfortable and bring him little things like tobacco and even a drink of whisky now and then. And when Lem had thanked him, he'd said, "Hell, I've got to hang you. Isn't that punishment enough?"
Lem puffed contentedly on his pipe and decided he should do something for the sheriff. But later on, after all this was over with.
He'd wanted to tell the sheriff that there wouldn't be any hanging, and he was wasting a lot of money building that scaffold and getting everything ready. But he couldn't without telling him about the pictures, and the looking and choosing, and he'd never told anyone about that. And perhaps it was just as well that he hadn't told him, because the scaffold was in the pictures.
He'd looked at so many pictures it'd given him a headache, and the scaffold was in all of them, and the people crowding around it, and Lem Dyer dangling by his neck. And then the deputy running out of the jail and shouting, stop, the governor just telephoned, Lem Dyer is granted a reprieve, and the people laughing at Lem hanging there and shouting back, cut him down and reprieve him.
It was nice of the governor, Lem thought, to take such an interest in him, and he'd gone on looking at pictures, trying to find one where the governor telephoned in time. There was one where Sheriff Harbson got sick just as he was leading Lem up to the scaffold, and he lay there on the ground looking terrible, and Lem didn't like that even if it did hold things up until the governor telephoned. And there was a picture where the Glenn Hotel caught on fire, but some people got hurt, and Lem didn't want that. He'd gone on looking, and finally he found a picture where the rope broke, or came untied, and he fell right through the trap to the ground. It took some time to get things ready again, and the deputy came out shouting stop before they got Lem back up on the scaffold. Then the sheriff led Lem back toward the jail, with all the people following along behind. Lem liked that picture, and it was the one he chose.