Clindar’s voice, slightly larger than life, came from the robot’s speaker.
‘It’s astonishing how calmly he accepts us. Won’t anything scare him?’
‘You will keep judging him by your own standards,’ replied Bertrond. ‘Remember, his psychology is completely different, and much simpler. Now that he has confidence in me anything that I accept won’t worry him.’
‘I wonder if that will be true of all his race?’ queried Altman. ‘It’s hardly safe to judge by a single specimen. I want to see what happens when we send the robot into the village.’
‘Hello!’ exclaimed Bertrond. ‘That surprised him. He’s never met a person who could speak with two voices before.’
‘Do you think he’ll guess the truth when he meets us?’ said Clindar.
‘No. The robot will be pure magic to him—but it won’t be any more wonderful than fire and lightning and all the other forces he must already take for granted.’
‘Well, what’s the next move?’ asked Altman, a little impatiently. ‘Are you going to bring him to the ship, or will you go into the village first?’
Bertrond hesitated. ‘I’m anxious not to do too much too quickly. You know the accidents that have happened with strange races when that’s been tried. I’ll let him think this over and when we get back tomorrow I’ll try to persuade him to take the robot back to the village.’
In the hidden ship, Clindar reactivated the robot and started it moving again. Like Altman, he was growing a little impatient of this excessive caution, but on all matters relating to alien life-forms Bertrond was the expert, and they had to obey his orders.
There were times now when he almost wished he were a robot himself, devoid of feelings or emotions, able to watch the fall of a leaf or the death agonies of a world with equal detachment—
The Sun was low when Yaan heard the great voice crying from the jungle. He recognised it at once, despite its inhuman volume: it was the voice of his friend calling him.
In the echoing silence, the life of the village came to a stop. Even the children ceased their play: the only sound was the thin cry of a baby frightened by the sudden silence.
All eyes were upon Yaan as he walked swiftly to his hut and grasped the spear that lay beside the entrance. The stockade would soon be closed against the prowlers of the night, but he did not hesitate as he stepped out into the lengthening shadows. He was passing through the gates when once again that mighty voice summoned him, and now it held a note of urgency that came clearly across all the barriers of language and culture.
The shining giant who spoke with many voices met him a little way from the village and beckoned him to follow. There was no sign of Bertrond. They walked for almost a mile before they saw him in the distance, standing not far from the river’s edge and staring out across the dark, slowly moving waters.
He turned as Yaan approached, yet for a moment seemed unaware of his presence. Then he gave a gesture of dismissal to the shining one, who withdrew into the distance.
Yaan waited. He was patient and, though he could never have expressed it in words, contented. When he was with Bertrond he felt the first intimations of that selfless, utterly irrational devotion his race would not fully achieve for many ages.
It was a strange tableau. Here at the river’s brink two men were standing. One was dressed in a closely fitting uniform equipped with tiny, intricate mechanisms. The other was wearing the skin of an animal and was carrying a flint-tipped spear. Ten thousand generations lay between them, ten thousand generations and an immeasurable gulf of space. Yet they were both human. As she must often do in eternity, Nature had repeated one of her basic patterns.
Presently Bertrond began to speak, walking to and fro in short, quick steps as he did so, and in his voice there was a trace of sadness.
‘It’s all over, Yaan. I’d hoped that with our knowledge we could have brought you out of barbarism in a dozen generations but now you will have to fight your way up from the jungle alone, and it may take you a million years to do so. I’m sorry—there’s so much we could have done. Even now I wanted to stay here, but Altman and Clindar talk of duty, and I suppose that they are right. There is little enough that we can do, but our world is calling and we must not forsake it.
‘I wish you could understand me, Yaan. I wish you knew what I was saying. I’m leaving you these tools: some of them you will discover how to use, though as likely as not in a generation they’ll be lost or forgotten. See how this blade cuts: it will be ages before your world can make its like. And guard this well: when you press the button—look! If you use it sparingly, it will give you light for years, though sooner or later it will die. As for these other things—find what use for them you can.
‘Here come the first stars, up there in the east. Do you ever look at the stars, Yaan? I wonder how long it will be before you have discovered what they are, and I wonder what will have happened to us by then. Those stars are our homes, Yaan, and we cannot save them. Many have died already, in explosions so vast that I can imagine them no more than you. In a hundred thousand of your years, the light of those funeral pyres will reach your world and set its peoples wondering. By then, perhaps, you race will be reaching for the stars. I wish I could warn you against the mistakes we made, and which now will cost us all that we have won.
‘It is well for your people, Yaan, that your world is here at the frontier of the Universe. You may escape the doom that waits for us. One day, perhaps, your ships will go searching among the stars as we have done, and they may come upon the ruins of our worlds and wonder who we were. But they will never know that we met here by this river when your race was young.
‘Here come my friends; they would give me no more time. Goodbye, Yaan—use well the things I have left you. They are your world’s greatest treasures.’
Something huge, something that glittered in the starlight, was sliding down from the sky. It did not reach the ground, but came to rest a little way above the surface, and in utter silence a rectangle of light opened in its side. The shining giant appeared out of the night and stepped through the golden door. Bertrond followed, pausing for a moment at the threshold to wave back at Yaan. Then the darkness closed behind him.
No more swiftly than smoke drifts upward from a fire, the ship lifted away. When it was so small that Yaan felt he could hold it in his hands, it seemed to blur into a long line of light slanting upward into the stars. From the empty sky a peal of thunder echoed over the sleeping land: and Yaan knew at last that the gods were gone and would never come again.
For a long time he stood by the gently moving waters, and into his soul there came a sense of loss he was never to forget and never to understand. Then, carefully and reverently, he collected together the gifts that Bertrond had left.
Under the stars, the lonely figure walked homeward across the nameless land. Behind him the river flowed softly to the sea, winding through the fertile plains on which, more than a thousand centuries ahead, Yaan’s descendants would build the great city they were to call Babylon.
The Other Tiger
First published in Fantastic Universe, June/July 1953
Collected in Tales From Planet Earth
Originally entitled ‘Refutation’, this story was retitled by Sam Merwin, editor of Fantastic Universe, as a nod to Frank Stockton’s classic but now forgotten ‘The Lady or the Tiger’.
‘It’s an interesting theory,’ said Arnold, ‘but I don’t see how you can ever prove it.’ They had come to the steepest part of the hill and for a moment Webb was too breathless to reply.
‘I’m not trying to,’ he said when he had gained his second wind. ‘I’m only exploring its consequences.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, let’s be perfectly logical and see where it gets us. Our only assumption, remember, is that the universe is infinite.’
‘Right. Personally I don’t see what else it can be.’
‘Very well. That means there must be an infinite number of s
tars and planets. Therefore, by the laws of chance, every possible event must occur not merely once but an infinite number of times. Correct?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Then there must be an infinite number of worlds exactly like Earth, each with an Arnold and Webb on it, walking up this hill just as we are doing now, saying these same words.’
‘That’s pretty hard to swallow.’
‘I know it’s a staggering thought—but so is infinity. The thing that interests me, though, is the idea of all those other Earths that aren’t exactly the same as this one. The Earths where Hitler won the War and the Swastika flies over Buckingham Palace—the Earths where Columbus never discovered America—the Earths where the Roman Empire has lasted to this day. In fact the Earths where all the great if’s of history had different answers.’
‘Going right back to the beginning, I suppose, to the one in which the ape-man who would have been the daddy of us all, broke his neck before he could have any children?’
‘That’s the idea. But let’s stick to the worlds we know—the worlds containing us climbing this hill on this spring afternoon. Think of all our reflections on those millions of other planets. Some of them are exactly the same but every possible variation that doesn’t violate the laws of logic must also exist.
‘We could—we must—be wearing every conceivable sort of clothes—and no clothes at all. The Sun’s shining here but on countless billions of those other Earths it’s not. On many it’s winter or summer here instead of spring. But let’s consider more fundamental changes too.
‘We intend to walk up this hill and down the other side. Yet think of all the things that might possibly happen to us in the next few minutes. However improbably they may be, as long as they are possible, then somewhere they’ve got to happen.’
‘I see,’ said Arnold slowly, absorbing the idea with obvious reluctance. An expression of mild discomfort crossed his features. ‘Then somewhere, I suppose, you will fall dead with heart failure when you’ve taken your next step.’
‘Not in this world.’ Webb laughed. ‘I’ve already refuted it. Perhaps you’re going to be the unlucky one.’
‘Or perhaps,’ said Arnold, ‘I’ll get fed up with the whole conversation, pull out a gun and shoot you.’
‘Quite possibly,’ admitted Webb, ‘except that I’m pretty sure you, on this Earth, haven’t got one. Don’t forget, though, that in millions of those alternative worlds I’ll beat you on the draw.’
The path was now winding up a wooded slope, the trees thick on either side. The air was fresh and sweet. It was very quiet as though all Nature’s energies were concentrated, with silent intentness, on rebuilding the world after the ruin of winter.
‘I wonder,’ continued Webb, ‘how improbably a thing can get before it becomes impossible. We’ve mentioned some unlikely events but they’re not completely fantastic. Here we are in an English country lane, walking along a path we know perfectly well.
‘Yet in some universe those—what shall I call them—twins of ours will walk around that corner and meet anything, absolutely anything that imagination can conceive. For as I said at the beginning, if the cosmos is infinite, then all possibilities must arise.’
‘So it’s possible,’ said Arnold, with a laugh that was not quite as light as he had intended, ‘that we may walk into a tiger or something equally unpleasant.’
‘Of course,’ replied Webb cheerfully, warming to his subject. ‘If it’s possible, then it’s got to happen to someone, somewhere in the universe. So why not to us?’
Arnold gave a snort of disgust. ‘This is getting quite futile,’ he protested. ‘Let’s talk about something sensible. If we don’t meet a tiger round this corner I’ll regard your theory as refuted and changed the subject.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Webb gleefully. ‘That won’t refute anything. There’s no way you can—’
They were the last words he ever spoke. On an infinite number of Earths an infinite numbers of Webbs and Arnolds met tigers friendly, hostile or indifferent. But this was not one of those Earths—it lay far closer to the point where improbability urged on the impossible.
Yet of course it was not totally inconceivable that during the night the rain-sodden hillside had caved inward to reveal an ominous cleft leading down into the subterranean world. As for what had laboriously climbed up that cleft, drawn toward the unknown light of day—well, it was really no more unlikely than the giant squid, the boa constrictor or the feral lizards of the Jurassic jungle. It had strained the laws of zoological probability but not to the breaking-point.
Webb had spoken the truth. In an infinite cosmos everything must happen somewhere—including their singularly bad luck. For it was hungry—very hungry—and a tiger or a man would have been a small yet acceptable morsel to any one of its half dozen gaping mouths.
The concept that every possible Universe may exist is certainly not an original one, but it has recently been revised in a sophisticated form by today’s theoretical physicists (insofar as I understand anything that they are talking about). It is also linked with the so-called Anthropic Principle, which now has the cosmologists in a considerable tizzy. (See Tipler and Barrow’s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Even if you have to skip many pages of music, the bits of text between them are fascinating and mind-stretching.)
The anthroposists have pointed out what appear to be some peculiarities of our Universe. Many of the fundamental physical constants—which as far as one could see, God could have given any value He liked—are in fact very precisely adjusted, or fine-tuned, to produce the only kind of Universe that makes our existence possible. A few per cent either way, and we wouldn’t be here.
One explanation of this mystery is that in fact all the other possible Universes do exist (somewhere!) but of course, the vast majority are lifeless. Only in an infinitesimally small fraction of the total Creation are the parameters such that matter can exist, stars can form—and, ultimately, life can arise. We’re here because we couldn’t be anywhere else.
But all those elsewhere are somewhere, so my story may be uncomfortably close to the truth. Luckily, there’s no way that we’ll ever to be able prove it.
I think…
Publicity Campaign
First published in London Evening News, 1953
Collected in The Other Side of the Sky
For the first few decades after the Martians lowered New Jersey real estate values [referring to Orson Welles’ famous War of the Worlds broadcast], benevolent aliens were few and far between, perhaps the most notable example being Klaatu in The Day The Earth Stood Still. Yet nowadays, largely thanks to E.T., friendly and even cuddly aliens are taken almost for granted. Where does the truth lie?…
Of course, hostile and malevolent aliens make for much more exciting stories than benevolent ones. Moreover, the Things You Wouldn’t Like to Meet of the 1950s and 1960s, as has often been pointed out, were reflections of the paranoia of that time, particularly in the United States. Now the Cold War has, hopefully, given way to the Tepid Truce, we may look at the skies with less apprehensions.
For we have already met Darth Vader—and he is us.
The concussion of the last atom bomb still seemed to linger as the lights came on again. For a long time, no one moved. Then the assistant producer said innocently: ‘Well, R.B., what do you think of it?’
R.B. heaved himself out of his seat while his acolytes waited to see which way the cat would jump. It was then that they noticed that R.B.’s cigar had gone out. Why, that hadn’t happened even at the preview of ‘G.W.T.W.’!
‘Boys,’ he said ecstatically, ‘we’ve got something here! How much did you say it cost, Mike?’
‘Six and a half million, R.B.’
‘It was cheap at the price. Let me tell you, I’ll eat every foot of it if the gross doesn’t beat “Quo Vadis”.’ He wheeled, as swiftly as could be expected for one of his bulk, upon a small man still crouched in his seat at the back of the project
ion room. ‘Snap out of it, Joe! The Earth’s saved! You’ve seen all these space films. How does this line up with the earlier ones?’
Joe came to with an obvious effort.
‘There’s no comparison,’ he said. ‘It’s got all the suspence of “The Thing”, without that awful let down at the end when you saw the monster was human. The only picture that comes within miles of it is “War of the Worlds”. Some of the effects in that were nearly as good as ours, but of course George Pal didn’t have 3D. And that sure makes a difference! When the Golden Gate Bridge went down, I thought that pier was going to hit me!’
‘The bit I liked best,’ put in Tony Auerbach from Publicity, ‘was when the Empire State Building split right up the middle. You don’t suppose the owners might sue us, though?’
‘Of course not. No one expects any building to stand up to—what did the script call them?—city busters. And after all, we wiped out the rest of New York as well. Ugh—that scene in the Holland Tunnel when the roof gave way! Next time, I’ll take the ferry!’
‘Yes, that was very well done—almost too well done. But what really got me was those creatures from space. The animation was perfect—how did you do it, Mike?’
‘Trade secret,’ said the proud producer. ‘Still, I’ll let you in on it. A lot of that stuff is genuine.’
‘What!’
‘Oh, don’t get me wrong! We haven’t been on location to Sirius B. But they’ve developed a microcamera over at Cal Tech, and we used that to film spiders in action. We cut in the best shots, and I think you’d have a job telling which was micro and which was the full-sized studio stuff. Now you understand why I wanted the Aliens to be insects, and not octopuses, like the script said first.’
‘There’s a good publicity angle here,’ said Tony. ‘One thing worries me, though. That scene where the monsters kidnap Gloria. Do you suppose the censor… I mean the way we’ve done it, it almost looks…’
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke Page 26