Guardsmen of Tomorrow by Martin H. & Segriff Greenberg, Larry Segriff Page B

It was a planet killer, a destroyer of whole worlds. We’d said when Garo Alexanian invented the technology that we’d never, ever use it.
    But, of course, we were going to. We were going to use it right now.
    It could have gone either way. Humans certainly weren’t more clever than Altairians; the technology we’d recovered from wrecked ships proved that. But sometimes you get a lucky break.
    Our scientists were always working to develop new weapons; there was no reason to think that Altairian scientists weren’t doing the same thing. Atomic nuclei are held together by the strong nuclear force; without it, the positively charged protons would repel each other, preventing atoms from forming. The Annihilator translates the strong nuclear force into electromagnetism for a fraction of a second, causing atoms to instantly fling apart.
    It was a brilliant invention from a species that really wasn’t all that good at inventing.
    With the countless isolated communities that had existed in Earth’s past, you’d expect the same fundamental inventions to have been made repeatedly-but they weren’t. Things we now consider intuitively obvious were invented only once: the water wheel, gears, the magnetic compass, the windmill, the printing press, and the camera obscura arose only a single time in all of human history; it was only trade that brought them to the rest of humanity. Even that seemingly most obvious of inventions, the wheel, was created just twice: first, in Mesopotamia, six thousand years ago, then again, much later, in Mexico. Out of the hundred billion human beings who have existed since the dawn of time, precisely two came up with the idea of the wheel. All the rest of us simply copied it from them.
    So it was probably a fluke that Alexanian conceived of the Annihilator. If it hadn’t occurred to him, it might never have occurred to anyone else in the Trisystems; certainly, it wouldn’t have occurred to anybody any time soon. Five hundred years ago, they used to say that string theory was twenty-first-century science accidentally discovered in the twentieth century; the Annihilator was perhaps thirtieth-century science that we’d been lucky enough to stumble upon in the twenty-fifth.
    And that luck could have just as easily befallen an Al-tairian physicist instead of a human one. In which case, it would be Earth and Tau Ceti IV and Epsilon Indi II that would have been about to feel its effects, instead of Altair III.
    We released the Annihilator-a great cylindrical contraption, more than three hundred meters long-from our cargo bay; the Quetzalcoatlm and the Rhamphorhynchus had had Annihilators, too, each costing over a trillion credits. Only one was left.
    But one was all it would take.
    Of course, we’d have to engage our hyperdrive as soon as the annihilation field connected with Altair III. The explosion would be unbelievably powerful, releasing more joules than anyone could even count-but none of it would be superluminal. We would be able to outrun it, and, by the time the expanding shell reached Earth, sixteen years from now, planetary shielding would be in place.
    The kill would go to the Pteranodon; the name history would remember would be mine.
    They teach you to hate the enemy-they teach you that from childhood.
    But when the enemy is gone, you finally have time to reflect.
    And I did a lot of that. We all did.
    About three-quarters of Altair III was utterly destroyed by the annihilation field, and the rest of it, a misshapen chunk with its glowing iron core exposed, broke up rapidly.
    The war was over.
    But we were not at peace.

    * * *
    The sphere was an unusual sort of war memorial. It wasn’t in Washington or Hiroshima or Dachau or Bogota, sites of Earth’s great monuments to the horrors of armed conflict. It wasn’t at Elysium on Mars, or New Vancouver on Epsilon Indi II, or Pax City on Tau Ceti IV. Indeed it had no permanent home, and, once it faded from view, a short time from now, no human