The Menace From Earth ssc by Robert A. Heinlein Read Free Book Online Page A

intellectual to personal. Dynkowski was not talking about just any G-O star; in the latter part he meant old Sol himself, Breen's personal sun, the big boy out there with the oversized freckle on his face.
    That was one hell of a big freckle! It was a hole you could chuck Jupiter into and not make a splash. He could see it very clearly now.
    Everybody talks about "when the stars grow old and the sun grows cold" — but it's an impersonal concept, like one's own death. Breen started thinking about it very personally. How long would it take, from the instant the imbalance was triggered until the expanding wave front engulfed earth? The mechanics couldn't be solved without a calculator even though they were implicit in the equations in front of him. Half an hour, for a horseback guess, from incitement until the earth went phutt!
    It hit him with gentle melancholy. No more? Never again? Colorado on a cool morning ... the Boston Post road with autumn wood smoke tanging the air ... Bucks county bursting in the spring. The wet smells of the Fulton Fish Market — no, that was gone already. Coffee at the Morning Call . No more wild strawberries on a hillside in Jersey, hot and sweet as lips. Dawn in the South Pacific with the light airs cool velvet under your shirt and never a sound but the chuckling of the water against the sides of the old rust bucket — what was her name? That was a long time ago — the S. S. Mary Brewster .
    No more moon if the earth was gone. Stars — but no one to look at them.
    He looked back at the dates bracketing Dynkowski's probability yoke. "Thine Alabaster Cities gleam, undimmed by —"
    He suddenly felt the need for Meade and stood up.
    She was coming out to meet him. "Hello, Potty! Safe to come in now — I've finished the dishes."
    "I should help."
    "You do the man's work; I'll do the woman's work. That's fair." She shaded her eyes. "What a sunset! We ought to have volcanoes blowing their tops every year."
    "Sit down and we'll watch it."
    She sat beside him and he took her hand. "Notice the sun spot? You can see it with your naked eye."
    She stared. "Is that a sun spot? It looks as if somebody had taken a bite out of it."
    He squinted his eyes at it again. Damned if it didn't look bigger!
    Meade shivered. "I'm chilly. Put your arm around me."
    He did so with his free arm, continuing to hold hands with the other. It was bigger — the thing was growing.
    What good is the race of man? Monkeys, he thought, monkeys with a spot of poetry in them, cluttering and wasting a second-string planet near a third-string star. But sometimes they finish in style.
    She snuggled to him. "Keep me warm."
    "It will be warmer soon. I mean I'll keep you warm."
    "Dear Potty."
    She looked up. "Potty — something funny is happening to the sunset."
    "No darling — to the sun."
    "I'm frightened."
    "I'm here, dear."
    He glanced down at the journal, still open beside him. He did not need to add up the two figures and divide by two to reach the answer. Instead he clutched fiercely at her hand, knowing with an unexpected and overpowering burst of sorrow that this was The End

By His Bootstraps

    Bob Wilson did not see the circle grow.
    Nor, for that matter, did he see the stranger who stepped out of the circle and stood staring at the back of Wilson's neck — stared, and breathed heavily, as if laboring under strong and unusual emotion.
    Wilson had no reason to suspect that anyone else was in his room; he had every reason to expect the contrary. He had locked himself in his room for the purpose of completing his thesis in one sustained drive. He had to — tomorrow was the last day for submission, yesterday the thesis had been no more than a title: "An Investigation Into Certain Mathematical Aspects of a Rigor of Metaphysics."
    Fifty-two cigarettes, four pots of coffee and thirteen hours of continuous work had added seven thousand words to the title. As to the validity of his thesis he was far too groggy to give a damn. Get it