THE WIND-BLOWN wAVE
"Come, follow me, and now look at THIS."
As she swept on before me, I was drawn down into an ethereal city of the far future, when man lived in splintered shards of sky-glass which caught the sun and held it for the people within, so future-far that floating fortresses and submerged industries recreated the face of the earth, and the marvel of all was that the buildings were transparent, but they went past us so fast I had not time to ask if their transparency was only to us, or if in truth the city was revealed in all its complexity to all its inhabitants. For we ourselves did not inhabit the city, but passed over it like a graceful wind, until high above us rose a palace of pinnacles wherein lay the center of power of that far-future world.
"How beautiful it all is," I said, feeling I must speak though the thoughts moved so fast they slipped from my mind before my tongue could articulate them.
"Yes, it is beautiful, but now you will see its end, and will see that the form of the city of man is not as important as you think, and that the death of man is a tragedy whether it comes in a dark sewer or on a diamond throne raised above the heads of all in the world." She pointed down into the labyrinthine depths of the spired hall before us, and I peered down to see an ominous ebony crate, the sole object of gloom in the whole of the pastel building.
"What is in that box." I looked now at last on Ozymiranda, yet still she stared at the box beneath us, and she spoke as from an old and sacred book of hallowed words.
"In this box is the end of the lives of the men who are living today in this city. Look well! See that the city is splendid, the women are comely, the children are fair, and the radiance of peace is upon them. Gone is the time of war, past are the perils of madness that pit men one against another. Yet evil remains, and the evil has built that black box." She spoke with a timbre that quivered my soul in its body.
"Evil has built that black box?" I turned from her face and gazed again on the enigma.
"And in this instant that box will be no more." She raised her arm toward the box, and the black cape on her arm moved forward like a separate being, drawing the two of us down and into the box itself. "We are again free from time, and you can see what you choose, pass what you choose, remain where you choose: time is at your whim --- if you will not, time moves not. Time is yours to command. Now!" And she vanished from my sight, and only the inner light of the box remained motionless before me. I was again in that bodiless state of the timeless world, and the frozen second of annihilation spread before my mind. My eyeless eye slid down through the confines of the box, seeking the source of the light, realizing that physical eyes would be seared to a cinder by its intensity, but in the bodiless timeless world, there was only the illusion of vision, and the vision was omnipotent. Through metal casings and complex devices I sank deeper into the contents of the box, and the radiation in the very center grew more powerful as I flowed down toward it. The puzzling, infinitely painstaking micrometer that seemed to control my every movement prevented my mind from shooting past the kernel of light; my mind narrowed the field of vision until molecules became visible. I saw the familiar shadows of electron orbits in motionless flicker about the enormously compacted nuclei, and I saw from their qualities of position that there existed high levels of energies in the center of this system. Deeper I probed into the mass, until the molecules grew in size and I knew I was in an intense concentration of trans-uranium atoms, their neutrons and protons packed tighter and tighter until their electron shells touched at the extremity of compactness. At last a single atom hovered in my view, and I knew my journey to the center was almost complete. I had never before seem such an energized atom, never since watching a hydrogen explosion literally annihilate mass into energy, and then the analogy dawned on me: this was the annihilation of a HEAVY atom, this was an enormously heavy atom in the process of turning into fantastic quantities of energy, quantities so fantastic that a few atoms could equal the explosive force of the sum total of all previously exploded uranium and hydrogen bombs. This was stupendous destruction in literally one atom. Yet more slowly I approached, peering down through the protons and neutrons packed into the core until their very components, the infitrons, began to loom clear. At last, at the center, was a single proton, engorged with energy, emitting such an immense quantity of radiation that it literally reached through the walls of the box. "That was our guide across the reaches of time and space," said Ozymiranda. “This intensity of radiation was surpassed only once before, in the moment of the beginning of creation of the universe, and it will never be surpassed in the history of the cosmos after this time. Past this very point at which you stare, the history is downward, from degradation to degradation. Look well at this apex of man on earth, and then we will follow it out through the earth, for this is the curtain of man, descending on him from out of unfathomable time, and only you will know its power." I turned back to the source and the point of apex, and still it stood, and I reached the ultimate vision possible, to see that one of this proton's infitrons had just surpassed the instant of conversion from mass into energy --- to all purposes, the energy at that one infinitely tiny point was infinitely enormous. I gazed at that point, which was the point of turning for the cosmos --- about that point, in an enormous fulcrum reaching infinitely in both directions, the development and degradation of the human race stretched, and this was the pivot. I hung, suspended on the peak, absorbing, trying to absorb what I saw. The sights before had made me believe what I saw, but the fact that this was the point about which all past and future history pivoted was most difficult to grasp, and I clenched my mind in an effort to appreciate the significance of this one infinitely tiny point in space. This, the apex of man, the end of the prelude and the irreversible beginning of the climax. I hung, gasping, and then, my mind filled with crushing realization, I willed the moment to advance the slightest second forward. It was as I had feared: the infitron flashed its energy out to neighboring infitrons until the entire proton reached its conversion point, and the massy proton boiled into unbelievable energy. Another proton, another, and a neutron, and another, and as the domino building blocks crashed into each other, time advanced, under my cautious will, to the point where the whole atom seethed into a ball of most intense energy. Nothing could resist the devastation of these energies, numbers large enough couldn't be mustered to tell the energies, only the absolute nothingness of my mind could exist in the maximum energy core of that gloomy box. As the scale of the event grew larger, groups of atoms flew faster and faster as my mind left the center of the reaction, yet inwardly from where I watched the core was a mass of fierce energy. As the explosion of energy reached the edges of the box, I at last reached the macrocosmic scale of events, but was still moving in minute microsecond increases in time, so that the globe of energy, all-enveloping, grew as slowly as I wished, following the searing edge onward and outward from the plasma core. The box, bracketed with metal, simply vanished as the rim of the energy-globe reached it; there was no dramatic outbursting of energy, it was as if a ball of all-consuming acid grew larger upon itself --- so fast did the annihilating energies travel that the physical components of the restraining box had not the time to recoil physically --- one instant the box was there, the next instant the box was not there, it merely WAS within the growing radius of fomenting energies. For the first few fractions of a second, the energy globe seemed to be the only object in motion. So rapid was the expansion of force that other motions faded into immobility in comparison; thus there was no reaction on faces, no jumping of heavy objects from the walls, no collapse: paintings, individuals, pets, jewelry, pianos, books, everything merely ceased to be. It was as if a vastly industrious hand with an eraser worked in a circle from a common pivot on a blackboard, and merely erased all traces of a two-dimensional civilization that had been drawn on the blackboard. At first the impact of so many impassive faces lured me into a feeling of unreality --- these motionless corpses couldn't actually be living. Even the grotesque shapes caused, as I paused in my slow movement through the world of timeless time, by the half-energization of a group of people, so that at one edge of the room only the feet would be visible, and then as the globe reached across the room, successively more of the legs and bodies were visible, until at the other end of the room the statuesque bodies stood solemnly in place, while the roof above their heads incongruously vanished in a huge scallop of destruction. There was no flash, since the wave was moving out with the same speed as the light from the wave, there was no sound --- there would never be any sound --- no one would hear this cataclysm, since oceans separated the parts of the world affected, and the sound waves, radiating linearly from a point, failed to follow the curve of the earth and dissipated into space. Never did the wave front slow to the speed of sound during its course across this most civilized continent. My approach to the building had been through a haze of admiration for the titanic architecture of this vast continental city, but as the wave emanated, I found myself watching the eternal constants, the people, as they were one by one, group by group, engulfed by their doom. I ignored the buildings, the clothing, and the surroundings, advanced and fabulous though they were, to drink in the tragedy of the dissolutions of millions of lives. Hardly did I see all of the catastrophe. I waited around the edges, sometimes circling the perimeter of the blast, but finally I was content, sated by sight, to follow a linear point out from the deathly center, watching as the effects changed from utter dissolution to a morbid melting out of all possible recognition. It was my chance to observe, as a hideously dispassionate observer, the limits to which the human body can be wrenched before it ceases to appear human in any way. At first, I noticed that the edges of the body didn't completely vanish, but increasingly noticed a gray-black clinker-like substance that began to form on the leading edge of the blast. And then when the body had been completely ruined, there was the forward impulse given to what looked like connected sheets of burnt newspaper, thin and crumbly, that slid down the edge of the force-wall like winter slush thrown against a window. Odd globules of metallic substances began to take shape in the ashy waste --- the gleam of a metal belt buckle, fragments of women's jewelry, pinpoints of yellow light from porcelain teeth with a gold base. As the bodies ceased to vanish, their attitudes before they vanished grew in importance. How varied are the ways in which man can die: about to bite into a juicy steak, and depending on their angle, they or the steak are consumed by the omnivorous blast first. Bodies flushed with the spasms of lovemaking, faces strained upward and contorted by the power of their emotions, obliterated at their peak feeling by an impersonal force. Women on the point of giving birth, doctors on the point of breathing life into infants, surgeons with pulsing brains in their bloodied gloved hands.