The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Livingston-san?”

  “Yes, Watson-san?”

  “You interrupted this program’s report on Ankai Maru. Should this program continue or terminate?”

  He waved a weary hand in the direction of Shin Matsumoto Base. “Let me just ask a few questions: First of all, I thought you were supposed to warn us if anything came within a thousand kilometers of the base.”

  “Ah so, but Ankai Maru pulsed proper ISF IDs and informed this program she carried high-ranking ISF officials desirous of conducting surprise inspection of Shin Matsumoto Base. Such information caused Override Subroutine to prevent initiation of Incoming Warning Program.”

  “Uh-huh.” He nodded glumly to himself. “Was it the Ankai Maru that bombed the hangar?”

  “Hai.”

  “Does she have more bombs?”

  “Hai.”

  The hijacked ISF ship carried four of her original crew. Bombs enough to blast Livingston-san and Watson-san outside Jupiter’s orbit. And someone willing to use those bombs. Someone willing to kill the eleven surviving liverocks for the cash their gem-souls would bring.

  “Watson-san!”

  “Hai, Livingston-san?”

  “Run Program Arrow on the Ankai Maru.”

  “[click] Apologies, Livingston-san, but authority insufficient.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Only commissioned ISF officer at staff level or above or individual appropriately authorized by CinCBelt can order this program to jeopardize ISF lives.”

  “You…you refuse to shoot down the Ankai Maru?”

  “This program is unable to run Program Arrow except on command of sufficiently authorized individual.”

  Yes, yes, he could see that, though he wished he did not have to. Watson had not dug in its metaphorical heels. Watson was paralyzed. Somewhere in its program, a statement or two, aware of Livingston’s lack of rank, had evaluated a conditional inequality and then disabled the launch routine for the surface-to-air missiles For the first time since leaving the University of Oregon, Livingston wished he had devoted less of his life to saving the helpless victims of technology and more of it to mastering the technology itself. Fluency in computer programming would sure come in handy.

  Back to the original plan, then. Load the liverocks aboard the sled—whenever it showed up, which it ought to any minute now—hide them, get some sort of weapon from the base, and hold off the poachers until reinforcements arrived.

  “Oh, no.” He sank to his knees, oblivious to the hard, cold stone beneath them. “Watson-san!”

  “Hai, Livingston-san?”

  “Have you notified Mars HQ—uh, Shin Edo Command—yet?”

  “No, Watson-san, order to broadcast has not been issued.”

  “Well, do It, dammit!”

  “Syntax error, Livingston-san!”

  He clenched his teeth. “Watson-san! Notify ISF Headquarters at Shin Edo on Mars that two shiploads of poachers have attacked, killing Habishi-san and Tomimuri-san, as well as destroying the fighter. Request assistance ASAP.”

  “Syntax error, Livingston-san.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ! Watson-san, you know what I want to do, would you please just help me out here?”

  “[click click] You must request Program Midnight Scream, details provided from this program’s memory banks.”

  He sighed. “Watson-san! Run Program Midnight Scream, provide details from your memory banks.”

  “Password of the day?”

  “Ryoan-ji.”

  “Running.”

  “And where’s that damn sled?”

  “[click] Commencing climb of outer crater wall. ETA your position six minutes thirty seconds, plus or minus forty-five seconds.”

  “All right. Thank you.” He settled into the shadow of a boulder to minimize the chance that his suit would reflect light.

  Six minutes. Long enough to grab a snack. He pressed the controls, and a tube slipped into his mouth.

  God, what he would give for a steak and a beer. He hated suitfood. Seaweed mush washed down with brackish water sucked from an opaque tube. Although maybe he should be grateful for the tube’s opacity. The water was probably brown.

  Grumbling to himself, he looked around. And mellowed. Eleven auras shone bright and complex and alluring. He shook his head. Mozarts or mockingbirds, it didn’t matter. For the chance to study liverocks, for the chance to someday comprehend their songs, he would live in the damn suit if need be. And die in it, to protect them.

  A flicker of motion caught his eye. About time the sled arrived. He began to rise and squatted down again immediately.

  The Ankai Maru came in fast and level. It spat a rocket that leapt ahead of the ship to dive into the outside wall of the crater. The stone beneath Livingston quivered. He blinked, and the recon ship vanished behind his back. His earphones crackled.

  “Livingston-san!”

  “Yes, Watson san?”

  “Sled destroyed. Should this program dispatch replacement?”

  “You might as well, Watson-san, although I don’t—”

  He never saw the ship itself. The rocket, though, ah, that he saw. It lanced toward the center of the crater as adrenaline slowed his time sense to a crawl. Long and lean, the missile wore a painted shark grin and stenciled lettering that read FRAGMENTATION. The warhead, striking, would splatter shrapnel throughout the crater. He twisted all the way around. I’m supposed to get a gun and defend my rocks!

  Hot bits of jagged metal would scythe down the liverocks, killing them, baring their crystalline souls to the stars.

  He dove over the top of the boulder in search of shelter. I’m supposed to fight off the poachers, not—

  Light flashed behind him. Upside down, head and torso behind the boulder, he waited to touch the ground He would have a few minutes before the Ankai Maru landed, minutes he could use to—

  Fire scorched his right ankle, then faded to frost He gasped as his suit lost pressure. A metal ring built into the leg of his suit contracted on his calf and tightened instantly.

  The spurt of arterial blood froze in midair and drifted slowly, oh so slowly, to the ground He blacked out before his helmet rang on rock—but not before knowing he had failed. Again.

  * * * *

  The voice murmured in his ears like muted surf. “Livingston-san.”

  “Ye…e…ss.…”

  “Wake up now, Livingston-san.”

  “Wat…son?”

  “Hai.”

  He blinked his eyes open. He lay on his back in his own bunk at Shin Matsumoto Base. There was something strange about that, but he could not put his finger on it. He sat up slowly. Yes, he had to be at Shin Matsumoto Base. He had left Yellowstone two years ago, rode the shuttle to Shin Edo via L5, linked up with Tomimuri, gazed appreciatively at pictures of the smiling marine’s nieces, and—

  “Unh.” He sank back. Now he remembered.…

  Then he frowned. His bare right foot and ankle looked fine. He wiggled his toes thoughtfully. He could have sworn…a dream? No. Not with those two hollows in his heart. The samurai of Shin Matsumoto Base were dead. As the alien singers had to be.

  “Watson-san?” He forced himself to rise and reach for his clothes.

  “Hai, Livingston-san?”

  “You did a good job on my right foot.”

  “Medi-freeze and autodoc programs ran at one hundred percent efficiency, Livingston-san.”

  He stopped. “You froze me?”

  “Apologies for insufficient consultation, Livingston-san, but circumstances seemed to require hasty initiation of Program Last Survivor. Your condition indicated need for regeneration, medi-freeze essential for successful completion. Is there pain?”

  “No.” He lifted his left foot off the floor, bounced lightly on the toes of his right foot, and shook his head in wonderment. “None at all. How long was I out for?”

  “Eighteen months, Livingston san.”

  It took a while to digest that. Wh—why s
o long?”

  “Rebels attempted to occupy Shin Matsumoto Base. This program permitted them to enter, to remove suits and to gather in dining room. Then this program executed explosive decompression of dining room. Tactics achieved main objective but exhausted air supply. To manufacture replacement air and to bring base up to standard pressure required more time than did foot regeneration. This program computed that Livingston-san would rather remain in suspension than live in suit for sixteen months. This program requests verification or denial of its calculation.”

  He stood for a moment in silence. “Verified,” he said softly. “Did you get them all?”

  “Hai.”

  And just where did you learn that ‘explosive decompression’ trick?”

  “Program Last Survivor installed subsequent to Celestial Equity capture and subordination of Ankai Maru.”

  Startled, he straightened up. “Their ships! Are they still here?”

  “Apologies Livingston-san. Acting under orders from Shin Edo, this program placed remote servos on board each with instructions to pilot ships to Mars.”

  “What?” He slapped an open palm against the bulkhead. “You sent them back without me? You left me marooned here?”

  “Hai. Shin Edo requested that you fulfill terms of your contract with Imperial Space Forces. Said contract does not expire for eighteen more months.”

  “But…but—” Helpless with astonished rage, he stormed through the base to the lock, found his suit—scuffed and dulled except for one shiny new boot—and swept out onto the surface.

  He could not believe it. The poachers had killed his guards, destroyed their ship, and murdered the liverocks—but the ISF wanted him to stay on.

  Punishment. He had failed, and this was his punishment. It hardly mattered that he had never signed on as a soldier. The military mind, in all its low cunning, had decided that since he had not stopped the rebels—never mind that the military’s own regulations had prevented him from doing so—he should have plenty of time to ponder his failure. Like eighteen months. Stranded on a chunk of rock spinning so far out from the sun that a candle would cast a sharper shadow.

  He would go nuts.

  He found himself striding up the crater wall and almost turned back. He wanted never to see the damn rock garden again. But he marched on anyway. He had returned to Yellowstone; he might as well view the site of this disaster. It would give him brood food for the next year and a half. And maybe he could find his lost foot What a souvenir that would make, huh? Maybe if he brought it back, nailed it to the wall, and made ritual obeisance to it, Watson would report that he had gone irrevocably insane, and Shin Edo would send a ship to retrieve him Ah, there was a thought.

  He had gone over the top and halfway down the interior wall when he slammed to a halt.

  A thousand tongues of green flame lapped the crater floor. A thousand miniature auras lit up the shadows. A thousand voices trilled sine songs in the megahertz.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” His knees buckled, his legs gave way. Slowly, oh so slowly, he dropped to a sitting position.

  The liverocks lived! But how? And so many—

  The shards. They held the life force. He had always thought the cores lived, building stony shells of protection around themselves. Clearly he had mistaken the pearl for the oyster. Never had he felt so good about a mistake before.

  “Livingston-san!”

  “Yes, Watson-san?”

  “Now you have seen and perhaps understood.”

  “Perhaps.” With genuine affection, he said, “Thank you, Watson-san.”

  “Ah…you are welcome, Livingston-san. Shin Edo advises Livingston-san that CinCBelt has conferred upon him unlimited authority to initiate Program Arrow.”

  “Better late than never,” he said dryly.

  “And this program reports detecting, at nine point two times ten to eight meters, on intercept trajectory with Shin Matsumoto Base, one Honda-Moi interplanetary vehicle. Distance too great to ascertain ETA, model, equipment, or crew size.”

  He pushed himself to his feet and looked outward, though it was far too early to see anything. “Celestial Equity poachers?”

  “So this program assumes, Livingston-san.”

  With one last, fond gaze at the nursery below him, he turned and made his way back up the slope. “This time we’ll be ready for them, won’t we, Watson-san?”

  “Hai, Livingston-san. Hai!”

  THE GENOA PASSAGE, by George Zebrowski

  I told myself that they would have to be fakes. At worst, it would be a good hike; forewarned, I would not be fooled.

  “I will take you to the places,” he said, “and you will pay me later, or not at all.”

  He gave me a rifle and said that two other people would come with us.

  Earlier, he had recited a pretty good tour guide spiel, how from 1945 to 1950 a route through the mountains from Germany down to the port of Genoa here in Italy had been used by Nazi war criminals, with papers forged for them by anti-Bolshevik Fascist Catholic Italian priests who feared the Soviet Union’s post-war takeover of Eastern Europe and in time the rest of the world, and imagined that the surviving Reichmasters would escape and form a necessary resurgent German power against Stalin—or there would be no one to stand against him, given the left’s blindness to the betrayal of their socialist ideals, which had never been any good anyway because they denied free market capitalism’s morality play of winners and losers, of rewards and punishments here and now and not in the life beyond.

  This much was true, and I understood it very well, but the guide told it with a touch of irony and disdain that piqued my curiosity while making it difficult to judge what he thought about it. The escapees’ enablers, Roman Catholic Franciscan priests, was fact in the public record, never contradicted or much discussed, for various reasons, by the Allied nations that had won the war against Hitler. Very old news.

  “So you’ll just show me their route?” I asked.

  “No, no,” he said, “much more than that,” his face stuck between a smile and a scowl.

  “More than what?” I asked, puzzled.

  “They’re still there,” he said softly, rubbing his dark eyebrows, “—along the passage.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, amused.

  “The pass,” he said, “…splits things up. Not reliably, but often enough to be of interest…to some people.”

  “You mean to me?” I asked. “Why?”

  “They killed your family, did they not?” he asked, suddenly gazing at me with undeniable conviction. “As you told me—no?”

  We had talked at breakfast in the resort hotel, where I had stopped for some lazy time in my walking tour, and he had taken me for a likely mark.

  “Well, yes, but long ago, as I told you, in the ’30s and ’40s of the last century. My grandparents, actually.” I had no idea why I had told him anything; too much free time sometimes made me babble.

  “Yes, but the…killers are still there, in the pass,” he said, open faced, like a child.

  “Still there?” I asked. “This is 2016. Who are you talking about?”

  “As many of them that went through that way are still there. Eichmann and Borman, and many others, to be met as often as we want to go hunting.”

  “Hunting?” I asked, annoyed by his provocation; he knew how to do it.

  He said, “But if you like, you can only watch them be killed.”

  “Watch, killed?” I asked. He was insane.

  “The others will shoot if you do not wish to do so.”

  “Others?” Even worse.

  “The living who still want it.”

  “Want what?” I asked.

  “To hunt those who fled. Thousands escaped. Only thirty thousand of some one hundred fifty thousand war criminals were ever caught or tried. Too much trouble to catch and try.”

  “Yes,” I said, aware of that much, “it was a thankless task.” Satisfying to catch, I told myself, only in the most private of
circumstances of delusional revenge. No one knew how many of these personal executions took place, or how many were mistakes, but I didn’t want to discuss it with him. I’d had enough of it with my survivor parents when they were alive, who had never been able to forget the tragedies of their lost parents, the grandparents I had never had a chance to know; worse when I found out that my biological parents and two brothers had been killed, and that the parents I knew had adopted me without papers and had decided never to tell me.

  But it got out, through an uncle who was not an uncle and who told me before he died; dust in his lungs from working in a metalworking mill stopped his heart one day; only a month earlier he had told me in a drunken stupor. Both my adoptive parents were dead by then, and he increased their number by telling me about my lost originals.

  I went on a walking tour of a warming Europe in 2016, living on money market earnings which ran up to twenty percent in that decade. Maybe I thought I could walk off the past’s irritants, drain them from my brain through my feet. I saw the metal dust in my uncle’s lungs, slowly working its way to kill him as he lamented the loss of his wife and son in the Hitlerian war, and the uselessness of his unverifiable economics doctorate in America.

  A shadow had fallen across my insides with that strange uncle’s death, and I had no idea of how to rid myself of its pall, except that I knew that it would lure me back to the locale of my birth, from which I had been exported to New York City, naturalized into citizenship so I could claim my college scholarship, Americanized into ideals that were already bleeding to death by the time the constitution had been adopted in 1789. Slavery and the Indian genocide built a country still in denial, chained to its past, still ill with immigrant enemies, as stained with human blood as anywhere else on earth.

  It was my shadowy inner landscape that had attracted the tour guide, a curious, thoughtful man, I told myself, who read my melancholy expression and body language, and knew a sucker when he saw one.

  His story was a lie on the face of it, but matched to my mood and personal history by an observant con man. What could I lose by going along for the show, which I would not even have to pay for up front, if ever?