: The Man Who Killed the World by Cummings Ray - Science fiction; Short stories; Biological weapons Fiction

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The Man Who Killed the World

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.

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.

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