Page 10 - 1959 VES Meteor

10
THE METEOR TH
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THE DECISION
(Continued from poge 9, col. 3) " Mavis, you have been gone
over
METEORITES
your departure, and determined when you would return. So they left the decision up to you, and con- structed me to help you make that decision."
"What is the decision?" said Mavis, almost overcome with curi- osity.
"The last wars killed all remaining animal life. The last man died over four hundred years ago. The earth is now nothing but hills and trees and grassy plains, and it will remain this way forever unless-and this is your decision. As the last man alive, you must decide whether earth shall ever have animal life again!"
***
Mavis sat on the edge of the stream with a small bottle in his hand. The bottle contained simple, one-celled, living protozoa, the low- est form of animal life. "What must I do?" he thought. "I can pour the bottle on the ground, and life on earth will be extinguished forever. Why not? Why• should I loose a race of bloodthirsty c reatures who only live to kill and destroy? Again, I could pour the bottle into the stream. There, the protozoa would be carried to the ocean, and in time, different forms of life would evolve from them.
Eventually, man would reappear o n earth.
"And then the whole damned cycle would start again! For all I know, another man was faced with this same problem, eons ago. Is life
just a cycle? Does it move in a con- tinuous circle, never accomplishing anything? A t that moment he de- cided.
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Mavis walked up the yellow path through the woods. His head was lowered, his shoulders stooped. Somehow the woods didn't seem beautiful any more. Nothing mat· tered now.
Time from departure: 2 earth min·
utes Destination: SOL
ETA: 40 earth seconds Velocity: 3 C2jEM
He leaned back into the pilot's seat and smiled. "Life must have a purpose."
Now he knew he had done the right thing when he had poured the bottle into the stream.
"Pretty soon I'll know that pur- pose ..."
The searing heat engulfed him. THE END
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a thousand years."
Pausing for a few minutes to let
this overwhelming idea sink in, the transmitter continued. "Y our ship traveled at three times the speed of light. Many years after you left, it was discovered that when an object exceeds the speed of light, its rela- tionship to time is warped or twisted in a direct ratio to the velocity. While you were gone ten y·ears, a thousand years passed on earth."
Mavis was about to ask another question, when a crescendo of sounds
and lights exploded in his brain, and darkness closed over him. When he awoke, he found himself on a couch in the middle of the room, and heard the soft voice of the mental trans- mitter. "You were physically and emotionally exhausted, so I put you to sleep for a time. But now we have little time, so relax, and open up your mind, so that I may reveal the past history of the earth."
Colors swirled into his mind and became pictures. He saw many things. There was a war between Earth and the moon colonies, and an even more horrible war between Earth and her colonies on Mars and Venus. Humanity became sick in spirit, and finally suffocated in its own hellishness. As death ap- proached for the survivors, the pic- ture in Mavis's mind faded.
"The rest can be better told than shown. The last people on earth had a very important decision to make, but they were sick, and 1hey• knew it. By this time, someone had discovered
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