The White Column

The lift took me deep underground, past five decks of steel and concrete, the guard glaring at me and my own escort, and apparently deciding he hadn’t quite got an excuse to shoot us. The site was well hardened.

General Burkholtz greeted me at Level 5 and took me through the second retinal identification. Then our far-seer was to be presented to me.

“We’ve tested him at short range, sir. To show us, under top secrecy of course, headlines of newspapers from different parts of the world, from a few weeks ahead. In each case the newspapers, when they were printed, were exactly as he had pictured them. It works for sounds as well—he recorded a new symphony before it was written. It was just a matter of fitting phones on the opti-encephalograph.”

“Why not just have him read all the future documents, then?”

“He can’t see to that degree of visual detail. And also because in every previous case where such an ability has been present in some degree, it very rapidly burns itself put. It did with Basil Shackleton. Already we are starting to get flickerings in the pictures he ‘transmits’. Once the ability has gone, it doesn’t come back. We don’t want to waste it, sir. He’s the best we’ve ever had, but judging from the rate of ‘flickering’ we have recorded, which is increasing exponentially, he probably has only one session left in him. We don’t want to waste it.”

“Is he aware of this?”

“That he’s nearly finished as a far-seer? Yes. I think he’s rather pleased at the prospect of becoming normal.”

“Can you tell what the headlines of the newspapers he saw say, at least?”

“The usual stuff, sir. Things going from bad to worse. Nuclear proliferation. Environmental decay. The blow-up getting nearer. We’ve photographs of them here.”

“It reminds me of a science-fiction story I once read,” I said. “Someone else who could see the future, just like this. The military, for obvious reasons, asked him to draw the most advanced weapon he could see from a century hence. They puzzled over the picture he brought back, turned it over to the best teams of scientists. Someone eventually recognised it as a crossbow.”

There was a very mirthless laugh from these, our own best team of scientists. They brought Richard Billings, the far-seer, forward and presented me to him. A very ordinary name, I thought.

He was a somewhat shabby, unkempt-looking man, despite the major’s uniform someone had put him into, not unpleasant-looking, but undistinguished and, apart from the pallor they all shared from living underground, out of place in this company of high-domed heads and spectacles. Like many people, he seemed somewhat shy at meeting me. I told him we all appreciated the patriotic thing he was doing. The pallor threw up his blushes and he stammered something.

“I hope I can help, sir,” he said. I asked him, as I suppose many had done before, how he thought he did it. “My subconscious—or something—points me at what I see,” he said, “but I can hardly remember it. I didn’t recognise the newspapers when they showed the photographs of them to me.”

“Is it painful?” I asked.

“No, not really, sir.”

Dr Gropius took me to one side.

“The general is right, as far as we know, sir,” he said. “We think the next session will be his last.”

“And what’s he programmed to find?” It was easy to talk of Billings as if he was not there. We thought of him as a weapon, not a man.

“The most advanced artefact existing a hundred years from now.” He smiled wryly. “I hope it won’t be the crossbow.”

We sat back. Billings, the opti-encephalograph clamped to his head, his arms and legs restrained, slumped forward in his couch. There was a faint humming as the current built up. Then a picture appeared on the screen in front of us.

On the screen was a flat, reddish plain. In the centre of it was a white column, with what appeared to be some sort of decoration at the top. The microphones recorded a whistling wind. There were what might have been low buildings or paving nearby, but scale and size were impossible to tell.

“A column.” I thought of “Ozymandias”—“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” I quoted. “Is it a ruin?” As the scene grew darker, I recognised the Pleiades in the sky. I could identify the scene as the Northern Hemisphere, anyway.

“Doric,” said someone, “Or Corinthian, maybe … Yes, ‘round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away’.” The picture flickered. There was what seemed a long pause, and it returned.

“That’s the longest interrupting yet,” said Dr Gropius, “and the quickest to manifest itself. It’s breaking up fast.”

Nothing seemed to be moving in the picture, save that it was sunset, and as night deepened more stars were beginning to appear. There was bright Venus, and Orion’s belt.

“It can’t have moved since classical times,” said someone. “Maybe it’s all that remains of the Roman ruins of Leptis Magna, or somewhere else in North Africa.”

“Or what the Romans called Arabia Felix.”

“If that is the most advanced surviving artefact, all the cities must be gone, all machinery …”

“All life …” said somebody else.

I have said it was impossible to tell the scale. Now the picture was becoming fuzzy. I noticed tiny things, possibly insects, were moving at the base of the column. As I watched, they moved into or under the low structure near it.

“Well, there’s life, anyway,” I said.

“A complete waste,” said the General. “We could look at this till Doomsday, and it wouldn’t tell us anything useful.”

“Except that Doomsday is coming,” said Gropius. “And this is all that’s left. The last trace of Man. We must have destroyed the Earth big time.”

“It remains top secret, with your permission, sir,” the General said. “No need for people to know what’s coming.”

The shuddering patterns of interference were coming more quickly and frequently to the picture now, and the distortions becoming more gross. Then the picture dwindled to a pin-point of light and died. Our glimpse into the future had ended. We looked at each other wordlessly. There was nothing to say.

But there had just been time to see the white column, on a soundless beam of light, lift from the ground, turn towards the Pleiades, and vanish in a flash.