THE SONS OF JAPHETH

Pilot Officer Roy Vanjan happened to be spaceborne when the Earth exploded. In that way he escaped the annihilation along with one other man, revered old Dr. Garfield Gar, who was in the space station.

Roy had backed well off in preparation for a mach ten dive on Kabul, which the enemy had lately taken over. He had one small omnibomb left in his racks and Kabul had seemed to be about the right size. But then the destruction of Earth changed his plans.

He watched, expressionless, as the planet exploded. He shrugged. There was nothing to do now but go see Dr. Gar.

Roy's foescope clamored insistently and he tensed, thinking a spaceborne enemy was on him, but it was only a piece of exploding Earth stumbling by.

Dr. Gar was alone in the space station because all able-bodied men had been called to fight World War V. The governments of Earth, in a rare moment of conscience during the Short Truce, had agreed that Dr. Gar, as the embodiment of all Earthly knowledge, should be protected from harm.

Pilot Officer Roy Vanjan didn't receive as warm a reception from old Dr. Gar as he might have, considering that they were the only two people left. The old man was combing his white beard with his fingers and didn't offer to shake hands.

"Well," said Roy as he defused his bomb and secured his single-seater in the spacelock, "I guess it's all over."

"Scarcely a historic statement," Dr. Gar said, "but it describes the situation."

"If you don't have anything for me to do I'd just as soon have a drink. They usually let me have a stiff one after I complete a mission."

Dr. Gar examined the hard young pilot from under shaggy white eyebrows. "I do have another mission for you but you can have a drink first. Peach brandy is all that's left."

"That'll be fine," Roy said. "I was never particular."

"Then you're my man," Dr. Gar said, giving him a deep look, "because I want you to go back in time and destroy humanity."

"Whatever you say." Roy's training showed. "But if I may comment, wouldn't that be superfluous? Except for you and me the human race is finished. We've achieved our objective." He spoke without irony.

"Never my objective."

"I'm not a scholar and I mean no offense," Roy said, "but I believe it was the co-ordinated spatial theory you announced back in '06 that made it possible."

"Misapplication," Dr. Gar said wearily, not wanting to go into it further for such an audience. Though, he thought, he'd never have another. "Come into my study and have your brandy."

"I still don't understand," Roy said later. He reached tentatively for the bottle. When the old man made no objection he poured a second stiff one.

"You want me to go back in time and wipe out all human life," Roy said. "I assume you'll tell me when and where. All right. That would destroy our ancestors and so we'd cease to exist, too. Wouldn't it be simpler to kill ourselves now? That is, if you see no point to our further existence."

Old Dr. Gar watched the other remnant of Earthly life twirl the brandy in the goblet. He looked at the viewscreen. It showed a panorama of rock dust and steam where Earth had been.

"You forget that we have annihilated everything," Dr. Gar said, gazing pensively at the screen. "Mankind, the animals, plant life and the tiny things that creep the earth or swim the waters. Your mission will be more selective."

"Selective? How?"

"You'll destroy man, but the rest will live. They may evolve into something better."

"If you say so, Doctor." Roy's devotion to duty was a well-worn path. "Assuming you have the machine and I can operate it."

"The machine is merely an attachment. It will plug into the instrument panel of your spacecraft. It operates automatically."

"Good enough. You always were a whiz at these things. How far back do I go? And who do I kill?"

"I want you to strafe the Ark, exercising care not to hurt any of the animals," said old Dr. Garfield Gar.

"Noah's Ark?" Pilot Officer Roy Vanjan asked. "You mean during the Flood?"

"Yes, I've computed it exactly. You won't have to worry about getting there at the wrong time."

"You mean after the forty days' rain, so I'll have good visibility. Good-o." He agreed readily and he'd do as the doctor said, of course, but he permitted a trace of skepticism in his inflection and a searching look into his goblet.

"No, not the fortieth day," Dr. Gar said, "but in what we are told was the six hundred and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month. The animals need dry land. I have it all figured out."

"I hope so. I mean I'm sure you have. You're the doctor, of course, but wasn't there some doubt about the accuracy of the old Book? I didn't know you were a fundamentalist."

"Am I not the repository of all human knowledge?" Dr. Gar asked. He was not a bit angry with Roy Vanjan. "Am I not the last best hope? Has not all else failed us?"

"Well, sure—"

"Did not the Noahic Covenant, under which human government was established, fail? Has not Japhetic science been our undoing?"

Roy looked lost. "I'm no scholar, Doctor."

"Agreed. But perhaps you'll grant that I am?" He looked with supreme calm at the young pilot. "I'm your new intelligence officer and you're merely my striking arm. Help yourself to another brandy, son."

"Maybe I'd better not. I don't want to goof the mission."

"There's time. You'll want some sleep first."

"All right. I suppose I'll need a steady hand to murder Noah and the rest."

"And Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, and Noah's wife," said Dr. Gar, "and the three wives of his sons with them, as it was written. Especially Japheth. But not the animals, remember."

"I understand that. If you think the Ten Commandments don't apply. Whichever one of them it was."

"They were an element of the Mosaic Covenant. It, too, failed. Perhaps the Garic Covenant, if I may be so vain, will endure."

The waters covered the Earth.

A moment ago, before he activated the attachment, Pilot Officer Roy Vanjan's spacecraft had been plunging towards the vortex of a ragged ball of dust and vapor, the destroyed Earth of World War V. Now, in the Adamic Year 601 (or was it the Edenic?—he couldn't remember, though Dr. Gar had let him study the Book), the waters stretched everywhere. Ahead the sun glinted in reflection from something rising above the surface. Ararat?

He made out the twin peaks. He throttled back to scarcely more than mach one and flew over them, high. His second pass took him back along his own vapor trail. This time he spotted the tiny surface craft making for the solitary bit of land. He had to hand it to Dr. Gar. The old boy's space-time grid had hit it right on the button.

Roy was too high to distinguish details but he imagined that Noah and his family would be on deck, full of the wonder of Mount Ararat rising, as promised, from the sea.

But there was another wonder—the vapor trails that stretched for miles across the upper air. Did they, down there on the Ark, think them a sign of the Lord? Roy smiled ironically. They were a sign of the lord Gar and of his servant, Pilot Officer Vanjan, come to blast them into eternity and change the future, to give the animals a chance.

Who would chronicle his role as the re-arranging angel, the unheavenly host about to gather up in violence the drifting souls below? Who, he wondered. Some simian scribe? Some unborn elephant prophet? An insectate scholar destined to evolve from among the creeping things that would inherit the Earth?

Or perhaps the written word would die unborn under the fiery hail of his guns.

No matter. These questions and more had been anticipated by Dr. Gar. Soon now, at the end of Roy's strafing run, it would be up to History to begin assembling the answers.

He slowed to mach minus and sent out wings. He would have to dip close to see if the entire Ark's complement was on deck. The job had to be done right or Earth was kaput. Nothing personal, Noah, old boy.

There they were, on the starboard side of the top deck, well out from under the pitch of the roof, craning their necks for a look at this miracle in the sky where they had expected to see only a returning dove.

"Behold!" Roy cried out. "I bring you tidings! But not the tidings of the dove. I am your lost raven returned—the raven of death! My tidings are of the new future which your descendants will not know and so will not doom."

The frightened upturned faces were far behind and he was talking to himself.

"Hear me, Noah, for I am come to destroy you, and with you your seeds of self-destruction. These are the tidings I bring from the future that has ceased to exist because you existed—the future that will exist once more when you cease to."

He heeled the spacecraft over and back. No more speeches, he told himself, though he had studied the Book in fascination. He was a killer, not a philosopher.

He would have to make his strafing run low. If he dived on the target his bullets would go into the holds and kill the animals. He roared at the Ark a few feet above the waves.

They were all together in a clump, the eight of them.

Farewell, Noah! he thought as his thumbs pressed on the death-dealing button. Farewell, Noah and Noah's wife!

Farewell, Ham, and Ham's wife and unborn sons—farewell, Canaan, and Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut!

Farewell, Shem! And unborn Elam, and Asshur, and Arphaxad, and Lud, and Aram!

And farewell, Japheth, father of sons of science! Farewell, Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras!

Farewell, all tribes. Make way for the animal kingdom in the Garic Covenant.

He had made three passes and now he zoomed into the sky. He had destroyed humanity and changed the future.

Or had he? He'd be dead, too, if he had, gone like the snap of a finger with the last gasp from the Ark. He had killed his ancestors. He had killed everybody's ancestors, but he existed still. Where was the paradox that Dr. Gar had overlooked?

The Ark had drifted closer to the shore. He circled it and counted the lifeless bodies lying in red stains on the gopher wood of the deck. Eight.

Then he noticed the change. The backs of his hands were hairier. His shoes were binding him. When he kicked them off his agile toes curled comfortably around the control pedals. He had a glimpse of a hairy, flat-nosed face reflected in the instrument panel. It laughed and the sound came out a simian yap.

But for all that he was still a sentient being. His control of the spacecraft was as expert as before.

It hadn't worked.

Do you hear, Dr. Gar? he thought. It's a flop. I goofed the mission. We're all dead, no matter what.

I give you a new commandment, man who would be God: Thou shalt not tamper with time.

He had changed the future and in the future he himself had been changed, but not enough. Somewhere below in the hold of the Ark were his ancestors who had evolved along a new path in the new future. The evolution had been slower, perhaps, but it had been as sure, external appearances notwithstanding. Somewhere in the far new future, he was sure, there was a simian Dr. Gar looking down in solitude on the remains of Earth.

The Ark had touched the land. The animals—his fellow creatures—were beginning to go forth, two by two, onto the shore of Ararat.

His foescope set up a clamor. There in the sky was a new thing, a spacecraft like his, yet unlike it. It looked deadlier, more purposeful. Ignoring him, it was diving out of the unknowable future to destroy its own past.

He watched in professional admiration as his fellow pilot screamed unerringly for the Ark in sacrificial completion of the mission he himself had failed to accomplish. Death to the animals, too—from an animal pilot.

He knew then that Earth would not die. It might circle lifeless for eons, waiting to welcome the foot—or paw, or tentacle—of others from outside. But it would be there, intact and serene.

Even as the mountain-shattering explosion came and he himself ceased to exist, he knew.