They could have seen it from the planets.
On Mars, if there are naked eyes, they could have seen it without other aid.
On that Christmas night, the Baltic Sea erupted. There was no warning. The faint signals the Nautilus received were not intercepted by the beleaguered but seemingly victorious Reds.
She penetrated the Gulf of Finland, dove to bottom and her skipper, summoning the men, prayed, Bashed a last word, and touched a small button installed some hours before on the table directly below the periscope. The rays, the temperatures, vaporized Finland’s Gulf in a split part of an instant. The sea’s bottom was melted. The Light reached out into the Universe.
Finland was not. Lithuania, Latvia, Esthonia, they were not. Kronstadt melted, Leningrad.
The blast kicked up the ashes that once had been Moscow, collected the burning environs and pulverized them and hurled their dust at the Urals. In the ensuing dark, a Thing swelled above the western edge of Russia, alight, alive, of a size to bulge beyond the last particles of earth’s air.
On the wind currents it came forward, forward across the north-sloping plains, a thick dust that widened to a hundred miles, and then five hundred, moving, spreading, descending, blanketing the land that night, and the day after, and the next. It thinned, over Siberia, thinned and spread until it was no longer blinding, till men could no longer see it or smell it or taste it. But still, where it rolled, day or night, they died.
The farther it surged from the reshaped Finnish Gulf, where the sea had come sparkling back, the longer men took to perish. But they perished. The radiation-emitting particles filled their lungs, they contaminated their food, they polluted . their water and could not be filtered out.
Men swallowed, ate, breathed, sickened and perished in a day, a week, two weeks—men and women and children, all of them, dogs and cats and cattle and sheep, all of them. Wherever they took refuge, men still perished. On the high Urals in the terrible cold. In the deepest mines, the steam-spitting darkness. There was no refuge from the death; it took them all, the birds of arctic winter, the persistent insects which had survived geological ages, the bacteria—all.
Surrender of those who survived, the southern dwellers of the nation, was delayed because they could not find who should make the offer; they did not care how abject the terms might be. But days passed. A week. Two weeks. And the message winged from Tiflis. It was over. The last war was finished.
The last great obstacle to freedom had been removed from the human path.