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                     The Man Who Killed the World

                  _PLANET STORIES_ Short-Short Story

                              By RAY KING

            Groff ruled the world through Fear. Fear of his
            awful power ... his twisted, mad brain. For one
             day that brain would crack. When it did, the
              World would dissolve in cataclysmic Chaos.

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                      Planet Stories Spring 1940.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


In his little tower, perched at the very peak of the great terraced
pile of buildings which was his home and his citadel, Peter Groff sat
brooding with hatred. The city, its factories, its vast plowed fields,
lay stretched below him. Millions of humans, at play in little games.
How he hated them! And they hated him--hated and feared him. It made
him chuckle. For all his life he had worked and schemed and fought to
make himself a power. The richest, most powerful man in the world--he
had attained it. They had called him cruel, in his youth, with his
ruthless business methods. He had laughed. Then they had no longer
dared call him anything which would anger him. And he had laughed at
that, while he had bought their governments and their armies with his
money.

He was laughing now as he thought of it. In seventy years he had made
the name Peter Groff a thing at which to tremble. Over all the earth,
from the heads of his groveling puppet governments down to the lowliest
child driving a plow in the fields, there was no one who did not
secretly fear Groff, the power of his money, the sound of anger in his
voice. Here in his citadel his servants trembled--and hated him. It was
funny, because by their methods they had gotten nothing; and he had
gotten everything.

Alone in his little tower, he sat and brooded. There was little else
to do now, and he enjoyed it--this contemplation of himself and his
achievements. The mirror beside which he sat reflected his image. He
stared at himself. His trusted companion. His face, thin-lipped, was
grim with its power. His eyes gleamed with it--eyes at which everyone
shivered with fear. The banked rows of his television tuning knobs were
within reach of his hand. And he decided that it would be amusing to
look and to listen from some of the newscasters' vantage points at what
was transpiring down in the city streets. He chose one in the factory
district, over by the river. They were the people who had least.

The little cathode mirror presently was glowing with the scene he
had selected. It was a tube-lit city arcade, far down by the lowest
level of the Inter-urban railway. Subterranean shops were along its
sides--places where people with the tiniest fraction of money might
spend it for something which wasn't worth having.

And as he stared, from one of the shops a young couple came--a
dark-haired, slender young man and a girl who was pretty, and who was
laughing. They were poorly dressed. They had nothing. But they were
laughing; and suddenly they were struggling as the young man fastened
upon the girl's dress the bauble he had bought, and then was trying to
kiss her for his payment. The scuffle was over in a moment; and Groff
heard from his microphone the girl's gasping, murmured words:

"Oh, Jac--I'm so happy--"

Groff stiffened. His thin, lined face was grim as he reached and cut
off the image and the murmuring voice....

Something happened to Peter Groff that summer night. He wasn't
conscious of it; he only knew that he was enraged as though an attack
had been made upon him. Atrocious things which menaced him needed
crushing. He pondered it, grim with his planning....

Near dawn, some of his servants knew that something had happened. They
heard him, with his wild laughter coming in an eerie muffled blur from
his little tower. Then young Peller dared go up to see what might be
the matter.

"Is there anything you need of me, Master?" he asked.

Groff was staring from his great armchair. "Not now, Peller. But I've
just discovered how to solve the situation very quickly. The Master has
just made up his mind, Peller."

It was gratifying to see the terror and confusion on Peller's face.
Groff's gesture drove the servant away, so that he would go down into
the corridors of the citadel and whisper with all the other servants as
they trembled, thinking the Master might be displeased with them.

       *       *       *       *       *

The thing took Groff more than a year. The thousands of men whom he
sent secretly throughout the world did as he commanded, and did not
know why they were doing it. Poor fools. The great scientist who for so
many years had been in Groff's employ gave him the technical knowledge
he sought. Fools. All fools. They could not guess what he was really
after. The lies he told them which awakened their cupidity were so easy
for them to believe. No servant could know what any other servant was
doing. No one could piece it together. There was only the masterful
Groff in his tower weaving the poisonous threads of his gigantic
enterprise into a pattern which only himself could see.

Then at last he was ready. He had tracked down the identity of the
dark-haired, slender young worker whom the laughing girl had called
Jac. And there came the momentous night when he sent for the young man
and the girl, and white-faced, frightened, they stood before him in his
little tower.

Groff lolled back in his big chair as he quietly regarded them. "Quite
an honor for you, isn't it?" he said. "Seeing me in person."

"What do you want of us?" the young man murmured.

It was pleasing to Groff, to see his terror. "I wanted to thank you,"
Groff said ironically. "It happened that I saw you two, one night about
a year ago. You made me realize what I must do. So I thought I would
tell you about it."

They could only stand wordless, frightened. Groff sucked in his breath
with anticipatory pleasure. In a moment now they would be more than
frightened; they would be utterly terrified--and their terror would
spread like a wave around the world.

Groff was lashing himself into grim anger. "You are going to die," he
said. At the girl's sudden little whimpering gasp he raised his hand.
"That sort of think won't help you any. You and everyone on earth--this
is your last night of health. Tomorrow, at dawn, you will all start
swiftly to sicken. In a week, a month--you will be dead."

How well they knew that his threats were never empty. They were huddled
together now, with trembling arms around each other as they stared
at him. He lashed himself further into anger as he told them that he
realized how millions of people were conspiring to the end that Groff
might suffer misfortune. A menace which he could no longer tolerate....
How those millions would squirm as they saw death coming upon them! The
supreme power of Groff at last demonstrated to its ultimate. Queer that
he had never thought of this logical climax to his great career--not
until that little incident a year ago when this young couple had caused
him to envisage it.

He was telling them now what he had done.... The little depots all
over the earth, compressed with caged bacteria. Little time-bombs--all
to explode within thirty minutes of this present instant. The women
and children, the aged, would die first. But the polluted air, the
contagion spreading everywhere--in a week, a month, the swift and
deadly bacteria would leave no one alive.

"You--are going to do this to us?" young Jac murmured at last.

"Why not? It is my destiny." Never had Groff felt so quiet and
comfortable a thrill as now; and this was only the beginning. "Others
before me have tried their little conquests," he said with his grim
smile. "Men who wanted power, and got it, just in a small way and for
a little while. There was one--I recall reading about him--one who was
so foolish to disclose all his plans by writing them in a book, years
before he had a chance to accomplish them. I am not like him. I tell
you now, when there is a scant thirty minutes before your inevitable
annihilation begins."

"You hate your fellow men so much," Jac murmured impulsively, "you
would kill yourself, just for the pleasure of killing the rest of us?"

To die. It sent so strangely a queer little shiver over Groff. He had
always felt it; but no one could ever know it, save himself. How many
times his vaunted reckless bravery had awed his fellow man! He sat very
straight now, and his eyes flashed.

"I have never been one to fear death," he said.

       *       *       *       *       *

But, as always before, he knew now that he was safe enough. His armed
citadel here was wholly safe from outside attack, even if the stricken
multitudes should find brief strength to try and assail him. His
retainers, thinking they were safe, would remain at their posts. Poor
fools. At the last, even they would be stricken and Groff would retreat
up here. Impregnable, here in the tower and its neighbor little rooms,
he could maintain his unpolluted air, and eat the food and drink the
water which he had stored here in such abundance. Perhaps even, nature
would let him live the longer for his isolation.

Master of the earth. The man who owned everything. Pride swelled him
again as he thought of that poor little fool who had only wanted to
make himself the titular leader of the earth, and in his own fatuous
conceit had written it all down in his little book.

"You have good reason to fear me," Groff said. "You realize it now?"

The young couple were white-faced and trembling as they clung to each
other. And suddenly the girl murmured,

"I--I pity you."

Groff caught at it, with his sudden wild rage flooding him. "You lie!"
he rasped. "You are frightened. You are terrified of me and my revenge."

"Revenge?" young Jac muttered. "I wonder what we have done to
you--except that we live and breathe and try to be happy." His arm held
the trembling girl closer; and he turned and gazed into her face, her
moist red lips quivering, her eyes like misted stars as she regarded
him. "If we are both to die," he murmured, "still we will have each
other, Manya."

"Yes," she whispered.

Then it seemed that the youth was not quite so afraid as he
straightened and fronted Groff. "Your revenge, when you kill us both,
is not quite complete," he said with a twisted smile.

They turned at Groff's gesture of dismissal. At the head of the great
staircase which went down from the tower, dominant with his power,
Groff stood with his heavy ornamented robe tossed over one shoulder and
all his emblazoned insignia dangling on his chest. The young couple
were still clinging to each other as they descended. Then they were a
little blob, dwarfed by distance, dwindling into total insignificance.
It was only a trick of lighting of the great staircase, of course;
but suddenly, just before they vanished, it seemed that the light had
magnified them into something gigantic....

       *       *       *       *       *

The thing was over at last. It was a week? Two weeks? Three weeks?
Groff had kept no track of the time. Exhausted with exulting he lay
back in his chair with his instruments around him. How wonderful it
had been. The ultimate conquest. The power of Groff and Groff alone.
So many times it had made him think of those other conquerors--those
little men of history who had been thrilled by their trips of triumph
into some petty land their armies had devastated. That little man in
his aircar, gazing in triumph, swelling himself with his pride as he
gazed at the death and destruction he had brought to just one petty
nation in three weeks....

Groff's triumph was over now. He had seen much of it, with his
telescopes ranging the city, and on his television mirrors before the
television went blank. It had been queer, how people, stricken so that
they knew they had only a few days to live, had rushed around bringing
their families together. Queer that then they had not really seemed
afraid. Queer how the churches had been crowded, with doomed people who
clung together and had a strange look on their faces as though they
were not afraid to die....

Then it was over. From the immense height and safety of his little
tower Groff sat surveying his conquered world. The man who had
everything. The ultimate of personal power. And what would he do with
it now? Queer thought! It was so queer, so whimsical a thought that he
chuckled, and then was laughing at it--laughing for so long that it
left him breathless. There was nobody here to hate. That was another
queer thought.

Was it days, or weeks or years, that now he sat alone in his little
tower, surveying his empty world? There was nothing to do but
gloat with pride at the greatness of himself; and to laugh at the
whimsicality of his hungry need to be angry at his enemies who now did
not exist. He had tired of that. Then there were times when he thought
it would be satisfying if he killed himself, like the man who had
written the book and who could not live when he realized that the time
had come when no one feared him. But Groff found that he had not the
courage to do that.

It tired him to laugh so much, so that often now he sat, just anguished
with emptiness. It was queer how that vision of the young couple
going down his staircase seemed always here to haunt and to puzzle
him. What had been about them that was so gigantic? The thought
enraged him, because he knew now that it was something he might have
wanted--something he had failed to get.





End of Project Gutenberg's The Man Who Killed the Earth, by Ray King