COUNTDOWN BY JULIAN F. GROW The moment is at hand--the fingers are poised--this is what comes next! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] 10 years of uneasy peace, since the Hour of Tragedy ... ten apprehensive, uneasy years pungent with fear, with hatred, distrust ... ten years like ten thousand in the past of man ... ten units out of the infinite, out of time the eternal, immutable, nonexistent dimension.... * * * * * 9 planets spinning ... nine spawn of the sun, one of them nascent, a hairsbreadth from its heritage. But which heritage? It could choose. The fertile warmth of the parent star ... or the star's pure fire? * * * * * 8 periods, in the gibberish of the sifters of chaos ... eight: Pre-Cambrian to Triassic--while flame cooled and became stone and lay latent, lambent, pent awaiting release--before from the fetid Jurassic darknesses the beasts of warm blood crawled. * * * * * 7 seas, once the womb of life, then too long its caul ... the common birthplace, then a strangling wall between. (Once too, briefly a high road for the courageous, now a new kind of night for marauders, shadowed shapes armed with pieces of the sun.) * * * * * 6 masses of land, cradles for the genesis of a myriad species ... and one of them Man. Man the Creator, the Protector, the Destroyer: builder of shrines, burner of saints, good father, good soldier, good killer.... Man, the creature of choice. * * * * * 5 nations remaining, sparse ruddy fruit of a thousand wars, nurtured by a billion dead. Five, the bloody consequence of union into pack, into tribe, into fief, to kingdom, empire and nation. The threads of history gathered finally into five flags, entwined in alliance at this point in time by a searing wind: Pan-American, Sino-Russian, Afro-Arabian ... racial armies, sons of the first beast to kill from anger, fathers of the unborn. Armies in the terrible truce of the fusion bomb ... waiting. * * * * * 4 farflung networks: metal wire and machines, and vacuum. Interlinked webs of detection and retaliation or attack, within the webs bombs ... within the bombs targets, mapped and doomed by a spark. Each alliance a network of aimed and armed missiles, in deserts, on mountaintops, hidden deep and in the surrounding seas. Each alliance a pattern of targets, always an instant from obliteration.