The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Every day Gaddis left his ship to confront the alien, to try to say or do something that might be understood.

  “If I touch you, will you pull away?” he asked, wondering what he was revealing about humankind that should better stay hidden.

  The eyes stared; the four-fingered hands rested on the ceramic floor, waiting. The alien seemed very tired at times.

  Gaddis made a show of taking a deep breath. Then he touched the alien’s bony extremity. The roughness of the barklike hand reminded him of the witch’s hand from his childhood nightmares.

  The other drew his hand away, just out of reach. Gaddis always expected the limbs to creak, but the alien’s motion was smooth.

  Gaddis sniffed the air. “Jeez! We both breathe oxygen. That should count for something!” He clapped his hands and hooted. The other’s head turned slightly, and the white eyelids came down halfway.

  Maybe he’s mocking me, Gaddis thought, even though he knew that human intuition was almost certainly blind to the alien’s body language.

  Gaddis gazed into the large eyes, communing across the stillness. He had played this game with various girls at summer camp, gaining utter devotion as often as contempt, but the alien seemed immune.

  Gaddis stared at the other’s bony knees. They were together and tucked under, as usual.

  “Are you anything like us?” Gaddis asked stupidly. “Or are you one of those who can never be reached?”

  The eyes closed as he spoke, then opened slowly. Sylvia had been the same. He could argue for half an hour or more, until he was ready to run through a wall, and still fail to break her stubborn silence.

  “If you’re really advanced,” Gaddis said bitterly, “you’d read my mind and take me off the hook.” He laughed loudly. The frustration was claustrophobic. He was locked tightly inside his human skull. Ship and spacesuit enabled him to leave his evolutionary niche, but he had not escaped its limits, despite the dry air that he shared with the alien.

  By what signs could a mind be read? Was there a universal language of telepathy? Of course not; mind reading simply moved the problem of communication back one step. Only creatures who were already in touch, who were the same in their natural history, could reach into one another.

  Gaddis rose and walked around the alien. There was no reason to think that fear, joy, sadness, or even curiosity, were common in the universe.

  “How about this?” he asked as he kneeled behind the alien and began to knead the hard, stringy flesh of the other’s shoulders. “More fun than the math and logic problems I showed you at Christmas, huh?” The alien sat still, accepting. “Are you as tired as I am? This should help. We are in contact, you know, of a sort.” He pressed with his thumbs, seeking reaction. “Tell me, was it planned for us to confront each other here? Are we to form suspicions and feel kinship grow, free from the errors of language?” Lorenz had lived with geese for decades and claimed to understand them. Skinner had insisted that given time he could even condition pigeons to read. Gaddis had known a professor who had observed his cat making decisions.

  Gaddis’s palms were red from the alien’s roughness. Perhaps this was not a biological creature at all, he thought as he stared at the neck, but only an interstellar scarecrow, made to keep upstart races in their solar cradles. Advanced galactic races had long ago abandoned flesh for more permanent forms.

  “Couldn’t you ask something of me, tell me to rub a bit to the left or right? It would be such a small thing.”

  Gaddis came around again and sat down in front of the alien.

  “Our problem is that we take each other for granted.”

  He looked around at the room’s soft angles. Heat had shaped the chamber. He thought of bees. Was something observing them? Perhaps watching this impasse was the way to real contact. Only another can see the back of your neck. Four or five observers can therefore sit in a chain and achieve a measure of objectivity—about their necks. Deathless humor from Earth, he thought, where they have the arrogance to name other people’s suns after themselves.

  * * * *

  The alien blinked, stood, and left the room.

  Gaddis held up his sweaty, reddening hands. Poisoned, he thought, dead by morning. He saw himself on a spit, turning in silence over the flames, while the aliens sat around a table, waiting…

  Need sleep, he told himself as he got up and walked through the portal into the hallway. He looked both ways down the tubular passage, then picked up his spacesuit from the floor and began putting it on, checking for rips.

  2

  The red sun was a cloud-wrapped wound looming over the ragged mountains as he stepped through the ghostly lens of the force-lock and plodded across the sandy plain toward the ship. The dying star never rose higher; the tide-locked planet always faced the bloody stain in the sky.

  Discovery, Gaddis told himself as he dragged one foot past the other, cannot be approached timidly. New experiences must be sought in the extremes of space-time, then measured and organized to produce knowledge. That was why he was here. The ageless child in him had long ago decided that he would see alien worlds circling far stars.

  Earth had hung nearby, half in darkness, at the start of his journey. He had gazed at the planet, imagining people swarming in their urban mazes, suburban gardens and towns. I’m not one of you, he had thought. The lights of nightside had seemed crude, pitiable torches thrown up against the great sophisticated darkness, brightening infinitesimal interiors. He had looked away, across clear space at the cleansing sun, and its brightness had flooded his brain, illuminating the skull-darkness of a million-year-old maze, driving the lurking beasts into the black hole at the back of his mind.

  Isolation and strangeness were opening up all the weaknesses within him. Despite the fragile bridge that he and the alien were building between them, the other seemed as silent as the stars had been to a century of listening radio telescopes. Scientific inquiry, so full of humble pride over its beggar’s tools of experiment and critical doubt, seemed to illuminate only an endless cosmic striptease. It was too tiring to exist as a mystery wrapped in an enigma, to learn and never be filled, hungering, to know that intimate voices were calling from alien interiors and not be able to answer.

  He stopped for a moment and searched out Earth’s sun among the poisonous clouds. One of the reasons he had gone into space was to get a clear view of his world. There it was, an unimpressive yellow spark. He would have preferred to have come from Vega or Sirius.

  Black clouds drifted across the red blotch. Lightning flashed within them. There was a flurry of ammonia snow as he came up to the tall egg-shape of the torchship and climbed the ladder.

  The lock slid open and he stepped inside. He felt more secure as it cycled and he was able to remove his suit. He went through the inner door as it opened and climbed the ladder to his sleep alcove in the control room. He could have kept a sleeping bag in the compound, but the thought of being unconscious with the alien nearby was too disturbing.

  The alien installation was a cluster of dark mounds on the ceiling screen. He wondered about the problem of psychological overlap with the alien’s physiology. The other was humanoid, and an apparent oxygen breather. There had to be some psychological overlap.

  “Don’t count on it,” he told himself in a whisper. He had talked to himself more than once recently, just to hear a human voice.

  He closed his eyes. The senses are a deep well, he thought, the mind a watery mirror at the bottom, dimly reflecting the universe. We hold a measurable angle of reality within ourselves, reduced to a shadow in the brain’s gray theater. The alien seems like me, but his nervous system enacts a different image of the cosmos. We meet at opposite ends of a bridge of silence…

  Gaddis had never seen any sign of the alien’s ship. Sometimes he dreamed that the other had been hatched inside the mounds.

  3

  A glowing window opened in the alien’s forehead.

  Light speared the darkness.

  Gaddis swam u
p through the beam to the black head and peered into the alien interior.

  Thoughts danced inside—birds rising up and circling each other, quantum shards of light struggling to complete a mysterious puzzle. Gaddis was fascinated by the clarity of the pieces; they trembled with the promise of knowledge.

  The alien’s white eyelids were pressed shut.

  Gaddis retreated from the head, suddenly afraid.

  The eyes opened and yellow beams shot out, searing Gaddis’s brain.

  It began to ooze out through his nose.

  He awoke in a sweat and stared at the alien compound on the screen, trying to quiet the brassy music of his fears, resisting the vast, cavernous regions of sleep as the seashore whisper of the air system grew louder. Finally, his will whored with his unconscious; his rational censor retreated behind a wall and he screamed without being able to wake up.

  4

  Sometimes Gaddis saw the expression and posture of an orangutan in the alien, recalling an old school acquaintance he had particularly despised. At other times the alien took on the demeanor of one chubby administrator with beady black eyes. Gaddis had never been able to convince the man of anything, and had been overjoyed to hear that the man had developed a chronic disease.

  Maybe there were other aliens in the compound, Gaddis thought one day as he examined himself in his bathroom mirror. A gaunt face stared back at him, resembling the alien. Gaddis swallowed as his throat became dry. I’ve been here too long, he thought, wondering if he should continue to wait for the message he had sent home after landing. He had said that he would wait for new orders; the find was too important to leave unattended. The message had reached Earth by now, and the reply was on its way to him.

  “This year,” he told himself cheerfully. One of the new jumpships could outrun the message and be here in a month. It was up to him to keep learning all he could until he was relieved.

  5

  In the room—pale creature—looking, sitting—nothing to say—ship outside—touching, tiring—star

  nearby—coming and going—fearing, nothing to say—empty inside—nothing—

  Gaddis awoke, sweating. Stupid idea. He had become the alien, with sentence fragments tearing through his brain, deformed perceptions flashing on and off, his body throbbing with odd desires.

  He dismissed the delusions and climbed out of the bunk. Is that how I see him? Cool, unsympathetic, savage underneath. He probably loves the animals of his world and gives to charity. The poor devil is as confused and tired as I am and wants to go home. Maybe he had an accident, sustained brain damage and doesn’t know what to do. Catatonic, but how can I help? Gaddis recalled another school chum—a small, thin boy who could never be caught, though he didn’t run far; he would simply dodge unpredictably while staying near his pursuer. It had been infuriating, to be so near and yet so far from catching him. Gaddis had been obsessed with beating him up, if he could ever get his hands on him. Sylvia’s fortified silences had been nothing in comparison.

  6

  Gaddis closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. The headache pulsed. Bursts of light dotted his field of vision.

  He opened his eyes and saw his own face smiling at him. He knew that it was his because he felt the smile from inside.

  “You’re pretty stupid,” the face said, and he felt the lips move. “I’d hoped that you could talk, but you’re just a dumb animal from that nearby star.”

  Gaddis opened his mouth to deny the charge, but only a clicking sound emerged from his throat.

  “Poor training, even for an animal. They sent you out and forgot about you, didn’t they?”

  The alien had been mocking him all along, Gaddis realized. He raised his hand in panic and cried out; it was not his own limb. A hissing sound struggled in his chest. He stood up. The other had been working up to this all the time, he thought as he looked down at his own shape sitting on the floor. The mockery and contempt that he saw in his own eyes were unbearable.

  “I’m going to kill and eat you,” his human lips said.

  Gaddis threw himself down on the figure, locking his rough hands around the pale creature’s throat. He squeezed, but the face laughed at him.

  “Do you understand?” he demanded, but the words came out of the human face. Gaddis squeezed harder. The eyes began to bulge. “You know fear, as I do?” he asked himself.

  The human shape went limp in his hands, its neck broken. He left it on its back and tried to stand up. Something exploded gently in his head; blackness drowned him.

  7

  Click-click-click.

  Hiss-hiss-hisssssssss!

  The two sounds alternated.

  Gaddis opened his eyes. He was lying across the alien. The other’s eyes and mouth were open. Snakes danced inside the mouth.

  Hiss-hiss-hisssssssss!

  Click-click-click.

  The mouth moved, as if trying to swallow the snakes. Gaddis pushed himself away from the face, afraid that the snakes would dart at his throat.

  He stood up slowly. The alien’s arms and legs twitched as the head rolled to one side and the eyes looked up at him. Gaddis squatted down on one knee. The large eyes watched him. The mouth trembled. A milkiness veiled the alien’s eyes as the eyelids flickered, closed, then opened slowly.

  “I’m sorry,” Gaddis said, trying to show that he cared. “I don’t know what happened. What can I do?” He stared across the silence, trying to see into the alien’s brain. It was there, behind the eyes, thinking about him, judging. I’ve cracked up, Gaddis thought. Just a wild animal. What will I tell them back home?

  The alien’s arm went up, beckoning.

  Gaddis nodded. “Yes, I know. No point in letting you suffer more.” He stood up and crushed the other’s neck with his boot, sure of having understood something at last.

  He wandered out of the chamber and searched the compound, but he was alone.

  8

  Maybe it had been a test of some kind? As the red dwarf had approached the solar system, the aliens had put an intermediary of sorts here, as bait. The entire confrontation had been recorded and was whispering between the stars to alert some alien civilization to the fact that humankind’s brain was still dipped in slime, despite a promising cortex.

  The alien had sacrificed himself, Gaddis thought. He had come here knowing that the dwarf was too near the sun of Earth to be ignored; sooner or later it would be visited, and the aliens would not have to reveal the location of their home world. Clever. And I’ve gone paranoid-schizophrenic.

  Sad. He had longed to be taken into the other’s mind, there to be shown around and made to understand. He had always demanded to know more than any teacher could give, often triggering resentment; this had been no different. Perhaps nothing less than seeing the face of God would ever satisfy him. What else could ever sort out his small divided nature and understand what he had done here?

  The alien, he realized, had communicated by putting me in his place, but I panicked at the empathic joining and killed him.

  Black clouds brushed across the red sun on the main screen as Gaddis prepared the ship for departure; there was no longer any reason to stay. For an instant he saw the homestar, bright above the wandering dwarf. Was there any reason to go back? Two solitudes had met here, two motes of awareness precipitated from a cosmic unconsciousness, but they had failed to cross the bridge of silence between them.

  The alien’s body was in the freezer; it would speak worlds to human biologists. He checked the temperature controls and set his sleep period for the return into the trillion-mile whirlpool of the sun’s family. Sleep stiffened his body, and he was only dimly aware of acceleration when it kicked in.

  “We didn’t do a good job of it,” he said softly to his companion in the cold.

  SUN’S UP, by A.A. Jackson IV and Howard Waldrop

  The robot exploration ship Saenger parked off the huge red sun.

  It was now a tiny dot of stellar debris, bathed in light, five million nine hundred nin
ety-four thousand myriameters from the star. Its fusion ram had been silent for some time. It had coasted in on its reaction motors like a squirrel climbing down a curved tree trunk.

  The ship Saenger was partly a prepackaged scientific laboratory, partly a deep space probe, with sections devoted to smaller launching platforms, inflatable observatories, assembly shops. The ship Saenger had a present crew of eighteen working robots. It was an advance research station, sent unmanned to study this late-phase star. When it reached parking orbit, it sent messages back to its home world. In a year and a half, the first shipful of scientists and workers would come, finding the station set up and work underway.

  The ship was mainly Saenger, a solid-state intelligence budded off the giant SSI on the Moon.

  Several hours after it docked off the sun, Saenger knew it was going to die.

  * * * *

  There was a neutron star some thirty-four light-years away from Saenger, and fifty-three light-years away from the Earth. To look at it, you wouldn’t think it was any more than a galactic garbage dump. All you could tell by listening to it was that it was noisy, full of X-rays, that it rotated, and that it interfered with everything up and down the wavelengths.

  Everything except Snapshot.

  Close in to the tiny roaring star, closer than a man could go, were a series of big chunks of metal that looked like solid debris.

  They were arrays of titanium and crystal, vats of liquid nitrogen, shielding; deep inside were the real workings of Snapshot.

  Snapshot was in the business of finding Kerr wormholes in the froth of garbage given off by the star. Down at the Planck length, 10-35 cm, the things appeared, formed, reappeared, twisted, broke off like steam on hot rocks. At one end of the wormholes was Snapshot, and at the other was the Universe.

  It sent messages from one end, its scanners punching through the bubbling mass of waves, and it kept track of what went where and who was talking to whom.

  Snapshot’s job was like that of a man trying to shoot into the hole of an invisible Swiss cheese that was turning on three axes at 3300 rpm. And it had to remember which holes it hit. And do it often.