The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  It was a smooth ride north, in an expensive air-conditioned and well-shocked black Rolls-Royce. I sat in the stressed suspension with a quiet old man and woman. The guide was up front with the driver. Business must have been good for the guide to have a vintage vehicle.

  We did not speak, as if on our way to a funeral or an execution, which in a sense was true. My companions in the facing seats were well past their sixties, maybe much older, but fit and booted for hiking out of a past that was not yet past. Their gray, well preserved faces held more than could ever be said. Their staring silence knew my youth.

  Outside the windows the beautiful landscape was ever more hilly as we neared the mountains. Gnarly trees, mossy rocks, goat trails, and streams, a stone house here and there all clung to a steepening that might roll up and over the blue sky, past the zenith and down the other side, as if the world was the inner surface of a hollow sphere.

  An amnesiac concentration locked me into a scanning, predatory patience, as if waiting to be confirmed in lost truths.

  The guide had told me of his long walks in this landscape, where he had stumbled upon the historied infinity of branching pasts, and I had told myself that only a lunatic would believe in the discovery that had given him the way in which he now earned his living.

  Still, however vengeful the suckers, he would have to deliver something to get paid. But what could he ever deliver? Once he was paid, I imagined that he might kill us in some seclusion of mossy rocks, but reminded myself that he had not asked to be paid in advance or out here.

  We reached what seemed an arbitrary destination and got out. The driver stayed with the car. The guide led the way.

  The old man and woman walked ahead of me on the narrow hot dusty trail, with high-powered rifles over their shoulders. I had refused the weapon offered to me, but I felt it pulling at me from inside the car.

  Our guide stopped and pointed, then came back to my side.

  I peered ahead, but could not see the figures coming toward us. The couple unshouldered their rifles. The guide handed me his binoculars.

  I put them to my eyes and fixed on the figure of a man. He shimmered as if through a mass of heated air, and for several moments held still between one instant and the next, in the way that an analog clock’s second hand seems to hesitate when you stare at it too long, as if it will never find the next moment.

  A guide moved ahead of a man I recognized from the album of mugshots which my guide kept for his customers. All the faces had a look about them that was unmistakable to an informed viewer.

  “It’s him!” the old woman rasped, wheezing in the hot morning air, and for an instant I felt that she would die of heaving.

  Then silently, they both raised their rifles and fired, and the figure’s head exploded into a watermelon red as the shots echoed and he fell backwards.

  His guide turned to look back and stood transfixed, then fled back up the trail, and seemed to fade away.

  The old couple sighed and stared, and trembled as if about to collapse, but held steady.

  My guide’s face was without expression as he led us back, and I could not help feeling deprived; there had been no one here for me to kill today.

  Back at the hotel, I tried to absorb the fact that I had watched Adolph Eichmann die, so many decades after his well documented execution in Israel.

  At dinner with the guide I asked, “So how do you do it?”

  He rubbed his unshaven face, sipped some wine, and said, “Not to be missed, eh?”

  “Is it some kind of…therapy?” I asked foolishly. You could do as much with a story, play, or movie, but not in reality…

  He acted as if he knew me better than I knew myself; but I could only imagine actors and marks. The guide’s business was built on vivid staging, I told myself, nothing more.

  “How often do you do this?” I asked.

  “As often as anyone wishes,” he said. “You’ll see tomorrow.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Better you’ll see for yourself.”

  “Will I have to pay to go again?”

  “If you wish,” he said, “or not.” He seemed to have forgotten that I had not yet paid him anything.

  We went again early next morning. The cooler air was transparent. The old couple was once again with us.

  My own stirrings began to struggle, and I wondered whether there would somehow be someone for me today. The guide did not know, but sooner or later there would be, he had told me, even though I knew no names beyond the famous.

  “I saw no one in the mugshots,” I had told him.

  “Not to worry, they were all guilty.”

  He gave me his binoculars and I saw Eichmann fall for a second time, bloodying the brown dust of the trail; this time the old couple shot the fleeing guide.

  On the hike back the guide said softly, “Well, you see. The variants may be endless, but these old ones feel it may be a set number.”

  “How often have they shot this one?” I asked.

  “Six times, but they hope to get them all.”

  “They might always be there,” he explained to me at the hotel, “to die in one variant and wait for death in endless others.”

  They did die, it seemed, and I felt that by the logic of the assumptions we would not confront that individual again, only new variants, however many; a large number, or an infinity, bestowing the happiness of endless revenge on the deserving.

  A useless task, except for a punctuated satisfaction, sufficient unto the moment, which I could not quite accept when I learned this much. Today, in 2016, I told myself, most of the hundred thousand or more who had never been caught were either dead or near death, as were the thirty thousand…

  In my time, my history…

  But not elsewhere, where they could still die, continuing to suffer without oblivion; except that they suffered only momentarily. Did they feel anything, somehow joined to all their dying others in their degrees of guilt, if they felt any, perhaps as a passing uneasiness of premonitions as they hiked through the pass to their exile, dying in some and escaping in others…

  I thought of the hundred thousand or more who had escaped to live out their lives when I saw the old couple in the lobby the next morning, sitting with hands folded, with their lost ones alive in their brains, waiting to be avenged again…

  Our guide was in the bar. I slid in next to him in the booth and asked, “Tell me, are the bullets fired into the past?”

  “They would have to be,” he said, sipping his coffee out of a chipped porcelain cup decorated with a mountain scene. There was a chip in the matching saucer. “Into one kind of past,” he added.

  “Can we walk into it, the past, I mean?”

  “Never really went that far,” he said.

  “But if you let them walk on toward you,” I said, “wouldn’t they walk into the present?”

  “It never comes to that,” he said, “since shots are fired before it can happen.”

  He sipped some more, touching the chipped part of the saucer.

  “You know,” I said, “that you’ll run out of clients.”

  “Nearly so now,” he said.

  “How long have you been at this?”

  “A long time.”

  “And you know how it has to end?”

  “Unless I find younger clients. Grandchildren. I’ve been researching some.”

  “You checked on me?”

  “No—you just walked in with…that look on your face.”

  “But I don’t want to kill anyone,” I said.

  “Keep looking,” he said, “so you don’t miss your chance. All this may disappear one day.”

  “And you’ll be out of work,” I said.

  He asked, “You do not wish to avenge yourself?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Even with that shadow on your face?”

  “You have an interest in seeing it.”

  He gave me a hurt look. “Do you not imagine it, do you not feel w
hat you should do?”

  “I’m too far from feeling the crimes,” I said, startled by the denial in my words.

  “But the dark…it comes for you,” he said.

  I asked, “What is it for you, only money?”

  He hesitated, then said, “I saw how some of them wanted it, and it moved me when they came looking for leads about the escapees and those who helped them, even as late as twenty years ago. They’d pay anything, once they heard what I knew.”

  He had told them what they wanted to hear and somehow staged the illusion, I insisted to myself as if waking from a nightmare.

  “But how did you? It’s some kind of trick.”

  “No, no, I found the places. I walked out there one day and passed some people, but when I stopped to look after them they were gone. Then I read an article about the Nazi escape routes and recognized faces. I can’t explain it all, except maybe by the way light splits…as in the stories I read about quantum experiments.”

  “That’s it? Nothing more…personal?”

  He looked away from me and finished his coffee, then put the cup down carefully on the saucer. It was either something personal with him or just business; he didn’t want to let on either way. “You’re still an observer today?” he asked.

  “You want to start charging me?”

  He smiled. “Sooner or later.” He seemed to know what I would think and what I would do.

  There was no one in the pass that day. The old couple sat down on a rock wall and waited, faces impassive as if expecting the last judgment to sound. I looked at my guide and tried to think why I was still here, seesawing when I should have fled from what had to be, at every other moment, some kind of charade. How many people had he hypnotized and brought here? How many had simply lost interest? How often can you kill an enemy? A time would have to come when no one would know enough history to care.

  The old couple did not look at me, but it was as if they could hear my thoughts, and were content with my presence. Their eyes had not met mine, not even once. How often had the couple come out here?

  I stayed at the hotel and struggled to understand what I had seen—or what had been given for me to see. My guide went out with new clients, and left me to myself. I imagined that it was part of his plan, to set the hook as deeply as possible.

  I tried to think, if I could call it thinking. My guide lived in the town as a bachelor, spending his earnings on the local women. He was who he seemed to be, a man with a job. But who was he?

  I began to think it a mercy that the escapees from the defeat of Nazi Germany might be dying along their escape routes, repeatedly, endlessly, at the hands of witnessing victims, now so much older than their tormentors.

  From the mugshots, I still did not recognize any of the fled thousands; any face in the rifle’s sights would do as well; they all had the same resigned look.

  Did anything spill over from one variation to another, as a fear and expectation of death? What could it matter if the fugitives had no idea of what was happening to them?

  Sudden death seemed too much mercy.

  A bullet in the head was not enough; but even dismemberment by a black hole would not be enough.

  Slow acting chest wounds spoke to me; but even dismemberment by a black hole would not be enough.

  For Eichmann, better than the simple rope that was still waiting for him in Jerusalem—in his future, my past.

  True, they escaped through the strangeness of the passage—but what made them visible to us? Did we somehow stir the quanta and pull ghosts out of ourselves?

  Who was this guide? Who was I? A figment of someone’s deranged imagination?

  A pile-up of the past had made me, and it was still there, crusted over, controlled by my denials.

  One evening I thought of exposing the delusions within myself, by commanding myself to awaken.

  I gave the order near sleep, with no result, but no result was itself a result.

  I lay there, abandoned and contentedly godless, but suddenly grateful that the quantum realm beneath reality might offer provision for a true hell, in which the worst of us had found eternal punishment, by being killed, eaten, and digested without end by the eternal mill of existence, shaped into shapeless monstrosities…

  But they did not know it. How could they? Did their killers know joy? Were they repeating their actions with the hope of killing all the criminals? How could they know when it was over? When the pass ran out of fugitives?

  How could there be a conclusion?

  One way to escape the pool of madness in which I was drowning, I told myself, was to expose the fakery, shadow my guide and discover the trick; it had to be a projection of some kind, with confederates falling down in the rifle sights.

  Walk into Eichmann and his guide and dissolve them.

  I followed my guide around for a few days, but found no evidence against what he claimed. He worked, partied, and womanized.

  Finally, I decided to walk right into one of his masquerades—so I went out without him.

  “Are you a Jew?” Eichmann asked me in the hot morning.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, and stepped toward him on the path. “You killed many others.”

  “Any of your family?” he asked, smiling. “If they hang me a million times, it wouldn’t satisfy…your kind.”

  “They will hang you, you know,” I said.

  “Possibly. I sometimes dream about it.”

  I took a step closer, thinking that I had to be talking to myself, because he was saying exactly what was expected of him.

  “They’ll catch you,” I said. “I know…that they did.”

  In his future, long in my past, the Israeli team was at work, with a submarine waiting off the coast of Argentina; the trial and the 1962 hanging in Jerusalem repeated itself, in one variant, and in an infinity of others; he could die in Jerusalem, or here, as often as anyone who wished to kill him would want.

  But doing the same thing over and over, I told myself, as if expecting a different result, was a good description of illness. Yet here, I knew, no one expected a different result, only repeated death, with always too little suffering…

  To kill your enemy was a mercy only to the living.

  I looked back along the way I had come, but he was gone.

  I met my guide’s car on the way back. The old couple was with him, rifle on the old man’s back. They went past without speaking to me. The guide seemed to know that I would not want a ride back.

  I walked on, thinking that the ground itself had been shamed by the first escapees, and had marked itself across the probabilities for all who would come, and see, and kill.

  They fell yet they lived, as if promised by some satanic redeemer never to die.

  At breakfast my guide said, “You have still not pulled a trigger on one of these…things.”

  “I don’t know which one killed…my people. I was adopted by other survivors.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Killing is killing,” I said, finishing my grapefruit.

  “So you live by tautologies? These criminals are all still there, as many as we can find, forever making their passage to the sea and to South America, Canada, Mexico, and the United States, fleeing all human conscience.”

  “I wish it was a finite number.”

  He smiled. “If so there will come a day when they will all be dead.”

  “A hundred thousand or more makes a lot of killing.”

  “Nothing compared to theirs. Shoot any face you see. No difference.

  “What good would it do me?”

  “Try it.”

  He seemed calm and convinced in his advice.

  “And your fee from me?”

  “No fee until you are satisfied.”

  I could just go away.

  “Who are you, really?” I asked, feeling resentful. “This may all be nonsense in a way I don’t understand.”

  “I may tell you,” he said, “who I am.”

  “But
you won’t, of course. You learned all this by chance,” I said, “or you invented the whole show somehow, and found…customers. How you do it makes no sense.”

  “I don’t understand it myself,” he said, “not being a physicist. But what happens is real, so it must make sense even if you and I never know how.”

  I looked into his face and could not speak. Physicists spoke similarly about the utility of quantum theory. It works, predicts, don’t ask how, get over it.

  I left that day, no charge.

  He had told me that he had inherited the business from his father.

  Some nights I dream that I am looking through field glasses, which suddenly become a rifle sight’s cross-hairs, and I see a mustached face, without which so many of us would not have been born. A traumatically shocked corporal from World War I had fathered a generation with his hatred…

  I have revisited the passage in later years, long after the guide had apparently died; no one at the hotel remembered how, or even if he was dead. I walked the trail and thought of taking up his job, but the resonances of the effect were gone from that dusty trail.

  Not enough customers in our variant.

  But the monsters are still marching down from the mountains, beyond our sight, spied by my guide and his clients, forever dying in that knotted infinity, where I feel myself pulling the trigger.

  We can kill them all, I told myself, in their various pasts, to at least deny them the lives they still seek to live out in our history and elsewhere; in a sense it’s all our history…

  One hundred fifty thousand dead Nazis suddenly seemed too small compared to millions of native Americans, African slaves, Armenians, Jews and Palestinians, Poles, Gypsies, Rwandans, Iraqis, Afghans, Syrians. One hundred million dead in the twentieth century’s wars and genocides. More wealth spent on killing and preparations for killing than on any other activity. Not to mention the countless who are dying from an ever poisoning atmosphere of an increasingly violent geophysical catastrophe.

  Guilty landscapes drift through our presents, and those of us who do not repudiate the past make new compacts with its crimes.

  Are there any kinder presents?

  I began to think of myself in the third person. The “I” was to feel with, the “he” for thought, both of us chance awarenesses, thrown off blindly from an indestructible thing-in-itself, willing itself forward. The thinking “he” hoped that the number of variants coming through the pass was in fact finite. The old couple had not lived to find out one way or the other, and could not have found out because endlessness cannot end; but in a finite series there would come a day when no new figures would appear on the trail, but any long time might just as well be endless…