The Leader stood before the intricate panel. It was located in a deep subterranean room, safe from all attack. He knew that there were other similar panels in countries all over the planet, different only in one respect.
The hundreds of buttons on his panel were set to send robot rockets roaring toward predetermined targets. In a second he could end the long war by a rapid series of pushes on buttons. The enemy could do the same, wiping out his own country, Aleme.
These panels had been constructed by international agreement, so that every country could know that it would be suicide to use atom bombs in war. Suicide for all. Afterwards there would be nothing but isolated bands of wandering savages, without the rudiments of civilization. A few generations after such a holocaust these wandering bands would lose all ability to learn. The art of reading would be forgotten. The past would be forgotten or distorted into legends of a God Race. If that happened, so much the better. When he reappeared again in the world he would be accepted as a God.
With his superior knowledge, and with modern weapons to back his authority, he could be in reality the world Leader he HAD to be to fulfill his insatiable ambitions.
The war was stalemated. Soon the tide would turn and the enemy would gain the advantage. His hold on Aleme would weaken. If he survived the defeat he knew must come, he would be tried as a war criminal according to the war code set up ten centuries before, and executed.
A few minutes of exertion pushing buttons, a hasty trip to the tri-matter slab, and over into the time machine that was set to return him to normal time rate after three centuries, and he would be in a position to rule the world.
He contemplated the terrific cost. A billion and a half people would be killed in the space of a few hours. Two hundred million of them would be his own state-slaves, his subjects.
His heart would feel the burden of that awful responsibility. No ordinary man was capable of deciding the good of the world for all future time with strict impartiality and willingness to sacrifice one whole generation so that world peace might come. No ordinary man had a great enough soul to carry the burden of the great responsibility. The ordinary man quaked with pangs of conscience at the murder of a single person. He, Hute, had many times had to decide on mass executions for the good of the whole.
He had tried, as other great leaders before him, to bring about permanent world peace by the forging of one world government, supreme, and controlled by one man,—unified under one dominant will.