Third Planet by Murray Leinster (free e reader TXT) 📖

we would not like that!"

The high officials made sounds of amusement.

"So we put our own ending to the comedy," said the Premier blandly. "The circuits are joined?" He asked the question of a craggy-faced service-of-supply colonel. The colonel managed to nod, and was stricken numb by the importance of the gesture.

"Then," said the Premier humorously, "we will destroy our enemy."

He waddled across the room. He put a pudgy forefinger on a button. He pushed it.

Even here, deep underground, there were roaring sounds as rockets took off for the west. All over the Com nations, carefully distributed rocket-firing sites received signals from the one pushbutton. They sent bellowing monsters up into the sky.

Three Com rockets reached their targets, and Nolan never quite forgave himself for it. They were murderous. They wiped out cities. But that was all. The rest of the rockets went off prematurely. A spread of half a hundred, crossing the North Pole, detonated just out of atmosphere. Others went off over the Atlantic. Not a few made temporary suns above the Pacific. Nolan brought moving specks within the thin red circle of his instrument, and pulled the trigger. The points flamed momentarily and left patches of luminosity behind them. And that was that.

But they continued to rise. On Earth they made noises like dragons. There was panic from their starting points. Those first out had not reached their targets! So the Com launching-sites flung more and more missiles skyward. One of them reached a city of the West. A second. A third.

The only possible answer was to blast them as they rose. Then to blast them before they rose. Nolan's task became the terribly necessary one of preventing radioactives from moving away from Com territory and into WDA nations—specifically one WDA nation. He did not think of the consequences of his actions except in terms of preventing excessively bright mathematical points of light from getting to the areas where there were so many fewer points of similar light which did not move at all. He tried to stop only those that moved.

But three got by him, and he could do nothing but detonate all the radioactives in Com territory. He had to! When that was done, there were six warheads coming up from Earth. He detonated them. There were massed warheads moving toward Earth from the Moon. It seemed that they practically tore space apart that they went off together. Then the moon base began to fire rockets, hysterically, at the Lotus, and it was necessary to detonate the radioactives in the moon base.

It had been estimated that an atomic war might be over in three hours. But prophecies are usually underestimates. Between the first and last explosions on Earth, in space and on the moon—there was a truly gigantic crater where the Com base had been—some thirty-seven minutes elapsed. Then the war was over.

There were some survivors in Com territory, of course. But they couldn't retaliate for the destruction of their nations. Their own bombs had done the destruction. They couldn't even gloat that the rest of Earth shared their catastrophe. It didn't. Most of the bombs exploded high, and over ocean. No less than three-fifths of all fallout landed in the sea and sank immediately. For the rest, the background count on Earth nowhere went above 4.9, and people could be protected against that.

The survey ship Lotus came gingerly down to ground. There was no longer any reason for tension. Its crew reported in and scattered to the various places they called home. They were very glad to be back. In the course of time they were all suitably bemedalled and admired and told that their names would live forever. Of course, it was not true.

Nolan didn't pay much attention to this. He left the Survey. He went to live in a small town. He married a small-town girl. And he never, never, never took any one of the excursions so many WDA people took to see the result of atomic explosions in Com territory, when their attempt to murder one Western nation backfired. Nolan had caused that backfiring. He very passionately did not want to see its results.

He'd seen all he wanted of that sort of thing on the third planet of a sol-type sun, some light-centuries from Earth.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Third Planet, by Murray Leinster