DOWN TO THE FIRST MAN

By: Harrison Howe

The general, once stocky and strong but now stooped and old beyond his years, his flesh loose and sagging as if caught unprepared for the deterioration, passed a thin envelope to the assassin, who took it without a measurable degree of regret or anxiety. One eye floated milky and blind in its socket; the other stared out of the scarred and weathered face like a rat out of a hole.

"Godspeed, son," the general said, his hand lingering on the envelope as if hesitant to let it go. Of course he finally relinquished his hold; only hope would have prevented him from doing so, and that had left him like a spurned lover some years ago. No one used that word anymore; it was without meaning or relevance.

The assassin said, "I don't think God wants anything to do with this, sir," and took the envelope, surprised to find how thin it was considering it contained nearly twenty years worth of research, so many brilliant minds working secretly together. Scientists and theologians, Biblical scholars and priests, politicians and professors in clandestine basement-room meetings, struggling to find the crucial time, the exact place. Too early, and his subject would not yet have been created; too late, and the beginning of the human race would have begun. Debates raged. Arguments erupted. In the past two decades three of the members of the secret panel had committed suicide; five others had gone insane; two had needed to be taken care of by the assassin after they had second thoughts and threatened to reveal the committee's existence to the world.

Finally, this: two unstapled pages in a plain brown envelope.

The assassin slipped it inside his jacket, a bit startled at the general's faltering. They knew each other for over thirty years, before the Fourth War, and never in that time did the assassin know the older man to be uncertain or afraid. The general had once led a group of three-hundred young mercenaries--the assassin included--against two thousand North-bred foot soldiers in the Battle of the Red and emerged victorious, and later in the War had single-handedly repelled a surprise attack from a remote outpost for three days before a battalion could arrive. He was an advocate for Project Erasure since its inception, his participation and support increasing after losing his only grandchild to a food-rationing riot nine years ago.

It started to drizzle; angelic haloes appeared around the streetlights. Not a soul passed by, the curfew having begun three hours before. The sixty million people of New York City slept behind the closed doors of towering tenements, twenty and thirty crammed into two-bedroom apartments and so many more sleeping in hallways and stairwells and boiler rooms; hundreds of thousands more in makeshift shelters in alleyways and subway entrances. Food supply stations and water-allocation booths were shut down for the night, the bodies of those shot as they attempted to storm to the front of miles-long lines removed hours ago.

The assassin followed the general's gaze out into the ruined world, a spinning globe swelled with thirty-four billion people. In China, they were mandating the taking of infertility drugs and putting to death anyone over the age of seventy-five; pollution from man-made floating cities had killed dozens of species of marine life; countries lacked funds to continue the development of lunar colonies; in Africa, reports of cannibalism and genocide were undisputed.

"We have truly come to this," the general said, and the assassin saw the glitter of tears on the old man's creviced cheeks. "All we've done to develop this damned Project, and we don't even know if it will work." But even as he spoke he knew that the Project's success rate was calculated to be near one-hundred percent. Every detail had been painstakingly accounted for, every aspect worked and re-worked; more attention, the assassin felt, than was really needed. The plan was simple: kill the father of the human race, and all his children would never have been born. The general knew it could not fail, and was only stalling now, making conversation to keep the assassin longer, to delay the inevitable. The burden of that inevitability, with the Project at its eleventh hour, lay heavily on him.

A few patrol skimmers flew by, far off. Both men wore scrambler clips beneath their coats, jamming the detection devices on the robot-controlled skimmers. If they were found out now, the Project was over, and the world would go on about its slow death.

The general watched the skimmers move out of sight. "I'm afraid, you know. I've never before said that to anyone but dammit, I'm afraid. How will it end? Will it..." Too proud to wonder aloud if the end of it all would be painful. He finished: "I'm too old to die in...in an undignified manner. I would like to have gone out in battle, at least."

The assassin said, "Don't think about that, sir," stepped back, snapped a salute that the startled general returned crisply, and then the assassin slipped a silencer-equipped pistol from his waistband and calmly shot the general through the left eye.

Ten hours later and almost exactly half-way around the world, the assassin stepped into the blue light of the Portal.

And for the first time in his life screamed as he was nearly turned inside-out:

Bright dimness. Cold warmth. Dark lights. A kaleidoscope of conflicting sensations and emotions, feelings and images; time slipping through his fingers like attempting to clutch water in his fist. Spinning, spinning: his brain bouncing around inside his flattening skull; backward: he is a teen, a boy, a baby, an embryo afloat in his mother's body; backward: he is the seed in the sperm of the father he'd never known; backward: watching civilizations fall into ashes, species regress into ameobas in dirty puddle waters, galaxies sucked back into the super-nova explosions that created them; every cosmic cataclysmic event in a backspin, all in the rapid blink of his aching melting eyes, tens of thousands of years blurring across the inside of his eyelids.

And finally, mercifully, darkness.

The Portal opened.

The assassin stepped out.

"...and to dust you shall return," he said, his voice odd in the still air, and he slipped the rifle off his shoulder and drifted into the foliage.

When the shot rang out birds burst out of the bushes, a startled cluster that swept across the cloudless blue sky; when the echo of it had finally died away, having drowned out the collective scream of billions of souls as they were sent into the gray nothingness of never-was, a calm that would last unbroken for eons settled over the Garden.

Copyright 2003.