The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “I said this was Harvey Strickland,” he enunciated slowly, ominously. “If you’d clean out your ears you could hear what I’m saying.”

  “Yes, sir. I know who you are, sir,” she said. Then doubtfully, “I’ll see, sir.”

  While he waited, he jabbed the circuit button on his phone to signal his own operator.

  “Yes, sir,” the young man answered.

  “You see, I got through without any trouble at all. I don’t know why it is, Goddamn it, that I gotta do everything for myself…”

  “This is Tom Higgins, Harvey,” a voice interrupted his tirade.

  “Wait a minute, Tom,” he commanded. Then to his operator. “Get off the line, damn it. Who the hell told you that you could listen in on my private calls?”

  There was a click as his operator broke the circuit without answering.

  “Well, how about it?” Strickland demanded.

  “No decision yet, Harvey,” the Senate Majority Leader answered apologetically.

  “What! Why, damn it, what’re you guys doing down there? You go back to that meeting and tell them to use an H-Bomb on those projectiles and no more nonsense about it. Damn it, Higgins, you hear me?”

  Tom Higgins’ voice drifted to him then, old and weary. “Yeah, Harvey, I hear you.”

  “Well then, get back in there and goose them pinhead generals off their fat duffs!”

  “There are a lot of angles to this thing, Harvey.” Higgins’ voice seemed to grow stronger. “We’ve got a couple of experts on extraterrestrial psychology testifying. A Dr. Kibbie and a Dr. Ralph Kennedy. Kibbie doesn’t know anything, he’s just a promoter. But Kennedy talks some sense. He says there’s something odd and peculiar about the behavior pattern. I don’t know, he says a lot of things, but he does point out one thing you can’t get around, Harvey. They haven’t hurt us yet. That’s an angle, you know.”

  Strickland picked up a solid-silver ash tray and hurled it across the office. It crashed against a far wall, gouged a hole in one of the heraldic symbols carved into the wall.

  “Angles!” he shouted. His voice was high and shrill. “Don’t give me any stuff about angles. Don’t give me any of that professor talk about peculiar patterns of behavior. I know what the damn angle is. I know what they’re waiting for. They’re waiting to hear from me. That’s what this is all about. And I’m gonna give ’em an answer. The answer is gonna be the H-Bomb. They’re gonna find out I got a little trick or so of my own. Drop that goddamn H-Bomb on them. That’s all I want.”

  “Look, Harvey,” Higgins tried to reason with him. “The discs are over big cities. A whole city would be wiped out—a million people or more.”

  “Who cares?”

  “Well, now, Harvey…public opinion…”

  “Public opinion? For Chrissake, who you think tells the public what its opinion is? Goddamn it, Tom, gimme a week with my newspapers and my television and radio stations—and you’ve got any kind of public opinion you want to ask for. You know that. You know how you’ve been elected all those terms. And if the President has forgotten…”

  “But all those innocent people…” Higgins said, almost with a groan.

  “All those innocent people,” Strickland mimicked. “So what’ll happen? Hell. You know what it’ll do, well as me. It always does it, any kind of trouble. It sends ’em back to their beds to breed faster, to make even more people than was lost. Far as opinion goes, them that don’t get hit will shrug it off. They weren’t hurt, so why squawk. Them that do get hit won’t matter. Look, Tom, you gotta take the broad view of these things. You tell them generals to stop shilly-shallying around, listening to college professors, and get back to doing what they’re suppose to do. Drop that H-Bomb, and stop arguing.”

  “Okay, Harvey,” Higgins answered faintly. “I’ll tell them. I’ll tell them how you feel.”

  “Whoa! Back up! It doesn’t make any difference how I feel. See? I’m just a newspaperman. I just print the news. I don’t make it. I got to tell you this again?, Something you learned thirty years ago?”

  “But, Harvey! Something as big as this. They won’t drop the H-Bomb on my say-so. Something big as this, Harvey, maybe you’ve got to come out into the open…”

  “And if I do, how’m I going to mold public opinion? I’d be an interested party. And if I can’t mold public opinion, you’ll all go down the drain.”

  “Maybe we should, Harvey. Maybe we should.”

  “Now you look here, Tom.” Harvey Strickland took a negotiating tone. “This is not your decision to make. You’re not a military man. You’re not trained to make the kind of decisions a military man has to make. So it won’t be your decision. It’ll be their decision. All you have to do is remind them they’re military men.

  “Remind them to go back and pick up on their West Point training, and places like that. Remind them to stop thinking about people and start thinking about troops and forces. Troops and forces don’t bleed, you know. They’re just tactical problems on blackboards.

  “Remind them about those conversations they used to have; where they used to speculate on whether the lower orders actually had any nerves and feelings. And the lower orders being anybody who didn’t go to West Point, or the like. If they’ve developed weak stomachs, tell them to start thinking about maps and forces and calculated risks, the way they were trained. Hell, they’re trained to be killers, so what’s stopping them?

  “You understand me, Tom?”

  “I’ll tell them, Harvey.” The voice sounded sick.

  “Yeah,” Strickland said contemptuously. “I thought you would.”

  He put down the receiver and rubbed his hands together. He didn’t resent having to blow some steam into his men once in a while. It was a reminder of what they would be without him.

  They wouldn’t decide to use New York as the test city, of course. Because he was in New York.

  And they wouldn’t decide to use Washington, because they were in Washington.

  It would be some place like St. Louis, maybe. There’d been a strong, unaccountable anti vote in St. Louis last election. Maybe he’d better give some more thought to replacing some editors and station managers out there. Then he chuckled. He was forgetting. There wouldn’t be any to replace after a few minutes. If they decided on St. Louis. Maybe he’d better call Tom and tell him to use St. Louis. No, better not. Let them make the decision.

  He touched a button beside one of the jeweled lights along the ledge of his desk; and knew it was like touching a raw nerve to make the man at the other end jump out of his chair and start running to the elevator. All these buttons were nerve endings, the nerves reaching down through the executive offices from penthouse to basement, even down to the subbasement where giant presses thundered day and night to grind out read-and-repeat public opinion.

  Precisely in the number of seconds it would take for his secretary to rush from his office, give the special signal to the elevator reserved for express trips to the penthouse, and the operator to make the pickup and full speed to the top, the elevator door in one wall of his office opened. From the door there stepped a gray, gaunt man who walked resolutely across the wide expanse of floor between the elevator and the desk.

  This was Miller, Strickland’s personal secretary.

  Forty years ago, Miller had been a college hero, the most popular man on the campus, the president of the senior class, the president of the united-fraternity council. That class had also contained one Harvey Strickland, not a college hero, virtually unknown on the campus, and president of nothing.

  Miller had been the man voted most likely to succeed. Strickland had received one vote—his own. But he had known, even then, that his vote counted more than all the rest.

  The friendless hours of Strickland’s college years were not lonely. He was busy accumulating information about each of his classmates, their families, their friends, the business contacts upon whom they expected to trade when they got out of school, the pranks they played, the remark
s they made when, hot for idealism, they said incautious things.

  The dossiers grew thick with facts and notes. They contained the essence of every chance contact he made. They contained records of invitations not issued to him, and the refusals of his. They contained details of the contemptuous refusals of girls. They contained every honor each classmate had received. And every honor which he, himself, had not received was an insult to be revenged—someday.

  The dossier of Miller was thickest of them all.

  Oh, that senior class scattered after graduation, like a flock of giddy butterflies. He could not keep track of them all, and in later years it had cost him a fortune in detective agency fees to trace them all. A fortune well spent.

  He had had one advantage over them. They’d ridden, sheltered and in comfort, on society’s protection-of-youth train. They expected to go on riding, in equal shelter and comfort. They knew nothing else. But he had had to slog it out, step by weary step, all the way. He knew the score, and began to cash in on it long before they began to get the hint that there even was a score. And that it wasn’t added up the way their professors thought.

  Lost in the melee of living in an adult world, fully realized only by him, was a certain statistic. For some odd reason, only one man in that senior class had succeeded in life. For everyone else, after the first few years of promising bright success, everything seemed to go wrong. Whatever they grasped seemed somehow to turn into dust in their fingers. They never knew why.

  Other men, lesser men, might have been tempted to let them know the prime mover behind the scenes, remind them of the cuts and slights and indifference, remind them they had backed the wrong horse; ignored the right one. This was not the Strickland way. This was the most delicious part of his triumph; that they never knew why. To believe that their failure was their own inadequacy was the deeper satisfaction; for if they had known their failure was not their own doing, their self-respect might have been preserved.

  This was the real power of secret rule through secret dossier, established as governmental and industrial policy a hundred years before. This was the source of his indescribable pleasure indefinitely prolonged; to take the place of wife, children, home, friendship.

  He looked now at Miller, gaunt and gray, over sixty, standing there before him, a clerk-servant, patiently waiting to be instructed, apparently beaten and resigned. The man should be happy to have this job at all. It was the first one he had been able to hold for more than a few months in all those forty years since school. He should be glad to have found a haven at last, where he could get the same paternal protection on which he had grown dependent in those years in a psycho ward; where the psychiatrists had finally convinced him to accept and adjust to the idea that he simply didn’t have the stuff of success within him. That being a college hero had been only a fluke of adolescent misjudgment, based in nothing more than a handsome face, a charming personality, and the backing of once-wealthy parents. Parents who unaccountably lost all their money, their position, even their social acceptability—and never knew why.

  It did not occur to Strickland, then, that his contempt for Miller had, on occasion, made him underestimate the man; that more than once Miller had stood patiently at his elbow while he worked the combination of the vault door which opened to the rooms of all those secret dossiers here in his building. That, as his personal secretary, Miller knew his movements so well that he knew when it was safe for him to work the combination he had seen and memorized, to go into these rooms where none but Strickland was ever allowed to go—and there to find out why.

  Strickland let him stand, a moment longer, passively; then dictated an announcement to him that the Government was about to take dramatic action against the enemy. As easily, he could have picked up the phone and dictated the message to his editor in chief. He knew Miller knew that, knew Miller could see no reason for being pulled off whatever he had been doing just for this—except that the boss preferred to do it this way. Which should be reason enough. And Miller knew that, too.

  “Oh,” Strickland said as an afterthought, “have the agency compile the usual data on a Dr. Ralph Kennedy, some damn title like Extraterrestrial Psychologist. The agency can find him. He’s big enough to be invited to the White House for consultation of the psychology of the enemy. He gave me some trouble. Damn near had the General Staff convinced they ought to wait until the enemy… Never mind, just tell the agency to drop everything and get on it.”

  He waved a negligent hand then, and Miller walked back to the elevator which was waiting for him in the floor below, out of earshot but handy. Strickland turned to the fax machine and began watching the sweep hand of the clock to see how many seconds it would take for the announcement to show.

  It hit the special-bulletin-to-all-communication-mediums machine when it should. Regardless of what might be going on elsewhere, his machine was still functioning as it should. It backed up his confidence that even if the rest of the country, the rest of the world, was going to the dogs he was still in position to grind out the easy-to-repeat slogans which would gel into public opinion, made to order.

  Less than two minutes after reading his bulletin on the fax machine, that the Government was going to get off the dime and act, Higgins’ call came through from Washington.

  “Okay, Harvey,” Higgins said in a voice which seemed drained of all life. “They made the decision you want. They’re going to put H-Bomb war heads on some anti-missile missiles. They’ve got ’em stored in ordnance depots around, labeled ‘Experimental Explosives.’ That’s so the local commands won’t guess what they really are, panic, and try to get out. They couldn’t decide which city to use first. The President made the decision. I expect he remembers the way the last vote went. He’s got that kind of mind. So it’s St. Louis.

  “If we fail there, then next is Detroit; then Toledo; then Dallas. God have mercy on us all. God have mercy on you, Harvey…and on me.” The voice trailed away.

  “Splendid, Tom,” Strickland said heartily. “You always deliver. I’ll personally watch it on my television monitors.” If the Senate Majority Leader appreciated this special consideration he was getting, he didn’t acknowledge it.

  “Washington disconnected, s-sir,” his operator said nervously. It was unheard of that anybody should hang up before Strickland. “Shall I get them back?”

  “I’ll take care of that later,” Strickland promised. “Don’t disturb me again until I tell you.”

  He turned to the network monitor to watch St. Louis go out in a blaze of glory, hoping to catch a glimpse of the actual explosion before the screen would go blank and dead. Instead of St. Louis, he saw one of his damn panty-waist announcers driveling along about the formations over New York, as if that were important.

  He felt a quick surge of anger until he realized the network couldn’t know something was going to happen over St. Louis. He pulled the phone toward him to tell the network to switch over to St. Louis; but an afterthought made him pull his hand away without lifting the receiver. Just in case, just in case there ever were enough opposition to amount to anything, and just in case some treacherous traitor in his own outfit told them he’d switched them over to St. Louis before the explosion…before, meaning he’d known in advance…

  He would have to deny himself the pleasure of watching his orders carried out.

  Never mind, there was another way. There’d have to be some kind of communication between the projectiles. Those circling overhead would know their St. Louis formation had been wiped out. They’d go streaking west to concentrate on the attack. That would tell him, just as well.

  He wanted to go out to his roof garden again, to be watching them at the instant they heard; see their confusion, see them go. But he also wanted to stay by his fax machines and television monitors because in Kansas City, maybe as far away as Des Moines, they’d pick up the explosion and report it.

  The conflict of desires made him furious, and he pounded on his desk in frustration that he couldn�
��t be both places at the same time. He looked up at the offending roof over his head. Goddamn it, somebody in his organization should have known he would want to watch the projectiles without having to go out of his house. They should have had his roof replaced with a plastic dome for the occasion. Goddamn it, nobody ever considered his comfort.

  He decided against going out into his garden. He decided to trust the reporters in cities surrounding St. Louis to let him know. Maybe the overhead discs wouldn’t go to the aid of their St. Louis formation. But he could be sure his own organization would function.

  The minutes ticked slowly away. The fax machines were still reporting nothing beyond the paralysis of the big cities, the fear, the foreboding, the total helplessness.

  Goddamn it! Why did the military have to be so slow! Them and their red tape! Now if it was under his control—if it was his organization, St. Louis would have been destroyed in five minutes and his stupid minions would be back clicking their heels and asking what he wanted now, sir. But the damn military. He thought of the handsome, lean, virile young officers. He turned livid with rage. Handsome, lean, and virile he had never been.

  And then he chuckled softly. There would be handsome, lean, and virile ones manning their stations at St. Louis. They would be putting the X Explosive in their missiles, not knowing, never knowing, that in another instant they would be handsome, lean, and virile no longer. Nor anything.

  It was fully dark out now. Here in New York. It would still be light in St. Louis, but it was dark here. There was a red glow around the discs, but nothing like the flaming skies of the first night.

  Twenty minutes passed, then one of the fax machines began to clatter at a fast tempo, transmitting the excitement of the operator through his fingers. The machine began to jangle loudly, to call attention to the special news, as distinct from filler stuff.

  It would be the far machine to make him get up from his desk!