The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  No more effective.

  Ignored now by the discs, they spent themselves in turn. The great V no longer paid us the compliment of wheeling massively to meet our charge. Rather now it seemed bent on some purpose of its own, without regard.

  Yes, the far ends of the angle lines were curving inward, bending, bending inward until at last they met. A cloudiness appeared in circle at the center, and at its center an incredibly bright spot of pure crimson light. The cloudy haze coalesced, solidified, striated.

  A monstrous, pupil-pierced and piercing, bloodshot eye looked down upon the city.

  I later learned it was the common experience of each human being in the city, but at that moment I was convinced the piercing gaze seemed directed upon me, into me, through me.

  * * * *

  The eye, at first stretching almost from horizon to horizon, was smaller now. Now it filled but half the sky. And this before I had realized it was shrinking at all, so firm its hypnotic gaze. But now that I had realized it, the shrinking was accelerated; the eye was going away from us; faster and faster; out into space.

  * * * *

  Yet even to the last, that piercing pupil penetrated me, impaled me upon its malevolent beam of light.

  And then it, too, winked out.

  * * * *

  The flaming mists of the sky cleared. Here and there, the brighter stars began to shine through it. In the distance, over Rock Creek Park, I could see the last interceptors returning to Earth.

  There seemed no triumph in their flight.

  * * * *

  The sky was clear and black. The stars shone bright—and cold. No longer friendly stars, twinkling the planets at us as if with amusement at the foibles of man.

  No longer friendly sky, velvet soft and comforting.

  There were Things out there.

  Our tiny Earth was spinning through that cold, remorseless vacuum, alone.

  And nothing to hide behind.

  NINE

  For three days the Black Fleet appeared, and disappeared, and reappeared. Over every major city of the Earth. The Black Fleet? The many, many Black Fleets. So often, simultaneously, in so many places that the wildest sort of reckoning could not estimate their number.

  Now there was no thought of nation against nation, man against man; man taming other men to his service, submission, his pattern of the only Right.

  Now the discs had reappeared over New York City once more. But this time their pattern was different. They did not appear, play out their ominous and meaningless formations, wash the Earth below them in a stinking miasma of revolting, evil dread, and then disappear.

  They stayed. For seven hours now they had hovered and circled endlessly; as if they waited for momentous signal known only to them.

  The city below seemed virtually dead. On appearance, at noon this time, having seem them several times before, the New Yorker had cocked an eye heavenward, shrugged, and gone about his business. But the fleet had stayed, and, as if somewhere a valve had been opened to let off the steam, the city slowed, and died.

  No one knew where or how it started, but through the long afternoon the feeling grew universal that this time they meant business. This was it. And the waiting grew intolerable.

  The waiting grew intolerable for Mr. Harvey Strickland.

  He sat, robed in his purple dressing gown, on his high-backed and carved throne-chair, there in his penthouse atop one of his many newspaper buildings. He watched the television wall, and curled his lip in fury.

  It wasn’t going over. With his expert, uncanny feel of mass reaction, he knew his organization was missing fire. They went through the motions of the formula, but too many of them were like that first announcer of the projectiles. Too many of them considered the stuff they spoke and printed as mere drivel. He’d fired the guy, of course, for letting the public see that he considered it so much nonsense, and ordinarily this would have been enough to make the rest of his organization men dig in with added display of enthusiasm, smacking their lips to show how much they enjoyed eating the crap. But they weren’t.

  And the people weren’t buying the crap.

  There was little traffic, little movement in the streets; and that little was hasty, furtive; rats scurrying from one hole to another. The people congregated in sheltered places, crowded under awnings, overhanging canopies, in doorways, at windows; and to heighten the similarity of wary rodents, they packed in the subway entrances where they could scurry downward into tunnels burrowed in the Earth when the menace came too near.

  Instead of watching his television screens and reading his newspapers for their interpretation, the goddamn people were seeing for themselves!

  His radio and television channels were blanketed with Harvey Strickland’s own subsidized extorters who pleaded, stormed, raged, and threatened the people to get down on their knees, bow their heads in humility.

  His scornful lip lifted from his lengthened, yellow teeth. Humility! He knew it, the Harvey Stricklands had always known that humility was the basest, most ignoble, unworthy posture a man can find; but it was the formula which had brought man back to groveling in the dust again and again. Subservient to the Harvey Stricklands, serving their ends.

  The formula just wasn’t going over!

  The damn rabbits sat in their warrens and cowered from the hunters above them—and the hunters, this time, were not controlled by Harvey Strickland. There should be processions. There should be martyred songs of defiance. There should be marching people. There should be line-up and clamor for self-destruction. The formula was guaranteed.

  And what did the damn rabbits do? They sat in their holes and trembled!

  Trouble was, this time, there wasn’t anything they could pick on, nothing weaker than themselves.

  He pushed his massive body, groaning under the weight of fat, out of his throne chair and began to pace the floor in sudden fury. Goddamn it, he’d missed his cue. He should have set up a scapegoat, a whole bunch of scapegoats. He should have manufactured some victims for the majority to persecute. Hell, that was the simplest formula in the book. The stupidest mayor of a stinking country town knew that one. Some blacks here, some Jews there, Catholics here, Protestants there, Irishmen, Swedes, Polacks, commies and homosexuals everywhere. Hell, with just a little twist of words, any and all of these could be made to look responsible for the Black Fleet. It always worked.

  And he’d slipped on it.

  He knew damn well that humans would never go out and tackle anything stronger than they were. They had to feel they were in the majority; they had to feel that the opinion of the majority was behind them—no matter what hypocritical false front they put on for public consumption—before they would dare to stand up and be counted. Oh they were strong on crusading for perfectly safe subjects, these humans; but they had to have something weak and running in fear before they’d change over from rabbits to dogs and run baying after it in furious, frenzied chase.

  But, damn it, he hadn’t had time. Nobody had tipped him off to expect the Black Fleet. What was the matter with that Pentagon? Why hadn’t they tipped him off? Wasn’t it their business to know, to anticipate? And weren’t they completely dependent upon him to shape the mass mind for them? Trouble was, they were so engrossed in strutting around upstaging one another with their silly little brass and braid symbols, they’d forgot what they were there for—and who kept ’em there.

  And why hadn’t his own direct organization men been on their toes, and, even without warning, put the formula into motion without waiting to be told? Hell, he’d trained them well enough. They’d been pampered and spoiled with the high wages he paid them, the silly little status levels he’d granted them, to the point that they would sacrifice anything, anything at all to keep their position. That was his technique. He’d seen to it that all his independent editors, on both sides of every fence, said what he wanted them to say; the pro faction coming out strong, the con faction advancing such weak arguments against that even a child could see
the only possible Right way to look at the question. Every damn one of his free and fearless commentators and columnists said exactly what he wanted them to say. They didn’t get hired unless their past opinions showed they could be trusted. They didn’t work for him if they didn’t go on freely and independently coming to the conclusions favorable to Mr. Harvey Strickland. Hell, they couldn’t work anywhere if they didn’t do that.

  So now, in a real emergency, they’d sat on their over-stuffed duffs and let the Black Fleet take over without making one move to capitalize on it to strengthen his position.

  Angrily, he waddled over to the television monitors and flipped the switch to turn them off—a symbolic destruction of them all. He turned to do the same thing to the battery of fax machines lined up along the wall, but paused to read the latest messages.

  The same thing was happening everywhere, over all the large cities of America, over every large city in the world.

  Everywhere, the discs hovered, and wheeled in formation, and waited.

  An unbidden doubt tried to force its way into his mind that there might be no opportunity in this to tighten his hold on the mass mind still more; that this might be something beyond his capacity to turn to his own advantage. He shook his massive head angrily, and shrugged off the weakness. He would not, he could not allow such an idea to take full form in his mind. He would be no better than the rabbits he despised if he did.

  But there could be no doubt about one thing. The Black Fleet was getting ready for the kill. And he didn’t see one single angle for getting in on the winning end of it, somehow.

  If there were only some way he could get next to the projectiles, deal with them. They must want something. They had to want something. There must be minds inside those discs. And where there were minds capable of all this, there were also minds capable of working the angles. Patriots and enemies? These were rabbit words, dog words. Humans, men, real men, the boys on top, they negotiated and dealt and worked the angles among themselves. They dealt themselves in and divided up the pot, each one grabbing all he could, and recognizing each other’s right to take what he could get.

  There must be minds like that in those discs. Capable of dominating the whole Earth in three days, as these were, they should also be capable of recognizing one of their own, and his right to be in the pot—himself, accustomed to dominating, one Harvey Strickland.

  So if they wanted to dominate the Earth, why didn’t they deal? Why weren’t they putting out feelers?

  Why weren’t they putting out feelers?

  A new thought crept in to horrify him. What if they had been doing just that? Hell, they could have taken over that first night. So what else could be the meaning of all that pointless appearing and reappearing? What if they were hovering there now, from noon until near dusk, waiting, waiting for him to respond to their feelers?

  And he didn’t know how!

  The frustration, exasperation pumped powerful shots of adrenalin into his blood, made him forget to wheeze and groan in protest against gravity pulling at his fat. His rage sent him waddling, almost running, out to the garden surrounding his house on top of the building. He watched the fading sky, followed the projectiles—as if by the very power of his eyes he could make them take notice of him, come to him, deal with him.

  They wanted to control the people, didn’t they? They hadn’t killed any of them off, so they must want them preserved for some end. Well, he controlled the people. He owned ’em. They’d have to come to him in the long run.

  Or did they figure to just hijack the lot of them, right out from under him?

  In a new surge of fury he kicked at some summer asters, a careless symbol of his wealth and power; for the space they occupied was more valuable than gold. Their feathery heads, purple and red and white, broke at the blow from his foot—as easily as the wills of pampered people broke when he put his foot down. The weakness of the plants teased him into sadism; he stamped on the bushes with his foot, ground the foliage down into the soil. He gave a final, harder kick at the thought of his gardener who would survey the damage with sad, patient eyes—and make no comment about it.

  Up there among the circling, black discs, there wasn’t a single anti-missile missile; not one. Not even a damn interceptor. There wasn’t any sound of anti-aircraft fire. They’d given up trying to fight. The people were like his gardener. When it was all over, they’d clean up the mess, and plant something else, and hope. He snorted in disgust as his mind gave him the picture of the terrible and futile patience of people who can’t do anything but try—and hope.

  Goddamn it! Why didn’t his phone ring? He’d put in another call to Washington. Why didn’t the operator get him through? He thought of going back in, picking up the phone, needling the operator about it. But he knew the response, the damn operator would whine and snivel.

  “Mr. Strickland, sir, I’m trying, sir. All I can do is try, sir. The military, sir, is using all trunks for the defense of the nation. But I’ll keep trying, sir.”

  The heat of his anger, the residual heat of the day even at this height of a hundred stories up, made him loosen the purple robe which swathed his rolls of fat. He walked over to the parapet surrounding his penthouse garden and breathed deeply of the summer evening air. With the city at dead halt, the damn stuff was nearly clean.

  He looked out over the parapet, a hundred stories below. But the ants weren’t crawling around on the threads of streets to amuse him as usual. There, to one side, the East River was a silver ribbon that partly encircled Manhattan. He had once thought of it as a silver ribbon around a tinseled Christmas package—all for him.

  Above him arose the transmitter tower of one of his New York television stations. It was a symbol, too, a royal scepter, if you please; more powerful and more commanding of subjugation of men’s minds than that of any king who ever lived. The sight of it, still standing there, pointed at the projectiles as an accusing finger points at God, telling him to mind his manners and do as he is told or the people will dismiss him as casually as they have dismissed so many other gods in the past; the sight of it restored his calm, his confidence of his power and destiny.

  He looked at the projectiles again, and this time calculatingly, with detachment. Let them send out their feelers; he didn’t know how to answer. In the long run they’d find they should have tried other ways to reach him. Let them strike, let them dominate, let them take control of Earth. In the long run they’d have to come to him. Because you can’t control the actions of men unless you control their minds.

  They’d have to come to him in the end.

  He chuckled sardonically, and made an upward stabbing motion with his middle finger.

  “And that’s just where I’ll give it to them.” He laughed loudly at the wit of his coarse pun.

  Every conqueror in the past had found out the same thing: You can’t control a country without help from the people, some people, of that country. So when these conquerors tried to take over and work through the men already established, they’d find out something. Something Harvey Strickland already knew: That when a man sells his independence of thought for money or status, without realizing it he also sells his capacity for independence of thought; and, like the worn-out columnists and commentators, he must play the same old record over and over, because he has no capacity for taking a fresh point of view. Through the years the record gets scratchier and scratchier and more and more out of tune with the times; until finally the pay-off, the man himself, realizes that way back there when he sold out, he really sold out.

  All through the whole structure there were men who had sold out to him; and when these conquerors tried to use those men, because they’d known that a man who will sell himself to one will equally sell himself to another, they’d have to turn to him.

  Yes, whoever was back of these projectiles would have to come to him in the end. He looked up at them, still hovering above. He laughed loudly again, and in his triumph, already tasted, he smashed his right hand aga
inst the cement top of the garden wall. He looked at his hand in surprise when the pain seeped through the layers of fat. He glared at the offending wall, and wished it were human. It had been a long time since a human had dared give him pain.

  He gently rested his bruised hand in the pocket of his robe and waddled back through the French doors which opened out upon his garden from the office. At his desk he sat down heavily, picked up the phone, and grinned in visioning the instant apprehension of the man on the switchboard down in the bowels of the building.

  “Got that call through yet?” he demanded.

  “N-n-no, s-sir,” the man stammered.

  “Well, damn it, if you’d stop sitting there playing with yourself and get going…”

  “I mean, sir, I’m not sure, I don’t know…”

  “Quit chittering. Why haven’t you got Higgins?”

  “Well, sir, his staff says that since he is Senate Majority Leader he is in a big meeting at the White House, with the general staff, and they won’t…”

  “Oh, shut up. Gimme the Washington operator. I’ll do it, myself.”

  And then he told the woman operator who responded from Washington, “Gimme the White House.”

  “Sorry, sir,” the woman said automatically. “All circuits are busy. The projectiles…”

  “Oh, crap!” he said. “Gimme your supervisor. Let me talk to somebody with sense. Gimme your manager.”

  “Supervisor,” another voice said almost instantly.

  “This is Harvey Strickland,” he said. “Break a circuit and put me through to the White House.”

  There was a short delay, a very short one. Only long enough for her to report the name and request to the manager and ask for instruction.

  “Yes, Mr. Strickland.” She came back on the line with the words. “Right away.”

  Almost immediately the White House switchboard answered.

  “This is Harvey Strickland,” he said again. “Get Senator Higgins on the phone for me.”

  “He is in a meeting with the President, the Cabinet, the General Staff, and the Heads of the Department of Extraterrestrial Psychology…” she began.