Disaster Revisited, Page 2

women, and children on Earth, wasit?--added up to considerable enjoyment. Jason Wall envied them with adesperate, passionate envy.

  When his thinking evolved to the next stage, he knew with petty triumphthat only Jason Wall would have taken that step. He had an incurabledisease. He was going to die. But the world would go right on,generations after generations. It wasn't fair. They had no right toenjoy what he, Jason Wall, would lose forever.

  He toyed--seriously toyed for some weeks--with the idea of destroyingthe world. It could be done: he never doubted it for a minute. Todevelop the atomic bomb, the governments of the free world had pooledtheir resources in a crash program costing two billion dollars, and hadsucceeded in a very few years. Two billion dollars--that was the kind offigure Jason Wall understood. For two billion dollars, couldn't he hireall the world's top scientists to build a super-bomb which would utterlydestroy Earth?

  He could, of course. In theory, such a crash program, with Jason Wall'smoney and industrial know-how behind it, was a possibility. But foranother reason, for a very simple reason, it was quite obviouslyimpossible.

  The scientists wouldn't do it.

  Suicide? Never. He decided that firmly, two months after the prognosis.World-destruction? Impossible. Then what?

  * * * * *

  It was Eve who, trying to flaunt an intellectual prowess she really didnot have, told him about time travel. There was this article she hadread in the newspaper Sunday supplement, about the possibility of movingbackwards through time. There was absolutely no natural law which saidit could not be done, the article said. It was merely a question ofprobability. For, while in theory time travel was possible, it waspractically impossible--unless, as the article suggested and Jason Wallthought in triumph, you pushed it. If you pushed it, the improbabilitybecame a possibility, then a probability, then a reality.

  Crash program, he thought.

  The world was made of particles. All reality, particles. Discreetparticles of matter, of time, of space-time. Building blocks of theuniverse. Now, take these particles; and return them to the positionsthey occupied a moment ago--and you travel into the immediate past.Re-arrange them into the positions they occupied years ago, decades,generations, aeons--and you have time travel.

  Crash program. Billions of dollars, he thought. All the world's greatphysicists. It could be done. He could do it.

  But--so what?

  Jason Wall smiled. It was the way his mind often functioned. Decide onsomething, apparently without relation to your problem. Then use it.

  He couldn't have the world destroyed, despite his money and the decidedpossibility of instituting a crash program to do it. He wouldn't be ableto fool the scientists, and the scientists just wouldn't do it.

  But a crash program for time travel, now that was something else. Thatcould be done. He would see that it _was_ done.

  For what purpose?

  To return to the dawn of the human race. To find dawn man, the firstman. Call him Adam. To find the first truly human being.

  To kill him.

  To snuff humanity out at its source, as a flame is snuffed before it canstart a fire.

  To prevent the human race from enjoying what he would never enjoy. Todestroy humanity by killing the first man.

  Of course, he told himself, that would obliterate, along with the restof mankind's history and comedy and tragedy, the first forty-five yearsof his own life. But those years didn't matter. By and large, they werethe hard years. They were the years of toil and struggle, to give himthe position and wealth he now had. Position and wealth--which he neverwould enjoy. Let them be obliterated then! With the rest of humanity,not in any sudden catastrophe, but quickly and without pain, at theinstant First Man is killed....

  * * * * *

  A week later, he got the crash program underway. Since the world'sscientists, like most of the world's intellectuals, were underpaid, itwas comparatively simple hiring them, especially since this was a timeof international calm. At first the physicists were dubious. Yes, thetheoreticians said, time travel was a possibility. No, the engineerssaid, it couldn't be executed.

  Execute it, he said. Here's money. Here are facilities. Here iseverything you will need. If what you need doesn't exist, make it, buyit, steal it--but get it. Our time is limited. We have a year. One yearto make it possible for one man to travel back in time.

  After three months, they were shaking their heads.

  After six months--when the first terrible twinges of pain hadbegun--they began to work feverishly.

  Jason Wall went regularly to his physician at this time for the drugsthat could ease his terrible suffering. They spoke, the doctor with nogreater objectivity than Jason Wall himself, of his disease. It wasabsolutely incurable. Even a crash program to find a cure wouldn't helpJason Wall. The damage done to his body was irreversible. And, thedoctor mentioned in passing, it was hereditary. That is, the germ of thedisease, or a predilection for it, or both, were carried in the blood ofmankind like a scourge, had been so carried, as far as medical scienceknew, from the dawn of history and before.

  If the murder he had planned ever bothered Jason Wall, which isdoubtful, it certainly did not bother him now. What was killinghim--hereditary! Why, the First Man he sought might himself beresponsible. Killing him would almost be a pleasure....

  After eight months something began to take shape. It was a little box."For hamsters," one of the scientists said.

  "Fool! I want to go."

  They made the box bigger.

  Ten months from the day the crash program had been started, the job wascompleted. Jason Wall had spent the last few days watching the world atplay. Happy children, contented people, folks who didn't have much, butwho did have happiness. They would go right on enjoying themselves,after Jason Wall died. It wasn't fair, he told himself. And he would seeto it that they didn't--by destroying their first ancestor, and his, sothey would never be born, so the human race would never be....

  "... all physical actions on the sub-microscopic level, on the level ofmolecules and atoms and sub-atomic particles and quanta of energy--allthese actions," the chief physicist told Jason Wall, "are reversible. Ifyou can control the reversal, you can return matter, energy, and spaceto its former state. Doing that, you travel through time. Therefore--"

  "Never mind the details," Jason Wall snapped. "That's your department. Ionly want to know this: will it work. Will it take a man back throughtime."

  "Yes, but--"

  "Very well. I'll go."

  "But we haven't figured out a way to return. If you go, you won't comeback. You'll have to spend the rest of your life back there."

  The rest of his life. Jason Wall smiled. The rest of his life could bemeasured in pain-wracked months, possibly only in weeks.

  Fifteen minutes after his discussion with the chief physicist, he satdown in the time chair. Anthropologists had been consulted for the finalstages of the project. There would be no mistakes. He would go where andwhen he had to go....

  "Ready, sir?"

  "Ready," said Jason Wall. Ready to destroy the human race--

  His vision flashed and blurred. Time moved backward for him.

  * * * * *

  A forest trail. Animals used it, had carved it out of the wall ofjungle. And the first man?

  Armed with a revolver, Jason Wall left the now useless time-chair andhid himself beside the trail. He waited three days, living on berriesand a small marsupial creature he had caught with his bare hands. IfFirst Man was around, he didn't want to frighten him off with gun-fire.

  At last, First Man came.

  He was, Jason Wall observed with objective detachment, a noble-lookingcreature. The first true man. Over six feet tall, perfectlyproportioned. He looked quite the healthiest man Jason Wall had everseen. If looks meant anything, he had never known a day of disease inhis life, and never would. Jason Wall's determination to kill grew.

  He did not have
to wait long. When First Man came by his hiding place hestood up, pointed the revolver, and fired it point-blank.

  He was, naturally, ready for the end. The death of First Man ought tomean the death of all men, the sudden blotting out, in all ages, of allmankind and all traces of mankind.

  First Man fell, mortally wounded. Blood gushed from his nostrils; hedied.

  And Jason Wall went on existing. He didn't understand. It made no sense.The death of First Man should have brought all humanity in all futureages to an instant, painless end.

  A woman, he thought.

  There must be a woman. Already with child, perhaps, and therefore, themother of all the human race....

  Jason Wall followed the forest trail, his revolver ready.

  If the woman turned out to be as beautiful as the man had been handsome,Jason Wall would not relish his job. He'd always had a soft-spot, theone soft-spot in his makeup, for beautiful women.

  He found her