The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  But it was date-lined St. Louis! That couldn’t be!

  The message rolled out before him. The local anti-air-attack services had decided to try a secret explosive not yet tried against the projectiles. But the anti-missile missiles had failed to function. There was no accounting for it. They just didn’t function. Not one would fire.

  The X Explosive was being loaded into interceptor jets. It would be taken by human pilots directly into the formation of the enemy and released. Upon request of their commanders, suicide volunteers had stepped forward to the last man.

  The machine fell silent.

  Strickland sighed in relief. So that was the reason for the delay. Well, it simply prolonged the pleasure of anticipation. He’d look at it that way. The suicide boys would do the job. Too bad there hadn’t been time for his local organization to get television cameras on the scene. They’d be young and handsome, lean and virile. The envisioning was almost as satisfactory as an actual picture might have been, but not quite.

  More minutes passed. He remained standing at the machine. He didn’t really expect it to register another message. How could it, when the H-Bomb let go? But another city, on this or some other machine, depending on which line was clear. He waited. Still more minutes passed.

  The machine jangled again. And again date-lined St. Louis.

  “Interceptors return to base—30—”

  “What do you mean, end of message?” Strickland roared. “Goddamn it, you’re fired out there, whoever you are!”

  But another machine began to jangle and pulled him away from the silent one. Detroit was reporting the same failure of missiles to fire. The same suicide pilots to take the X Explosive to the enemy. Then the same silence, the same waiting.

  And the same report that the interceptors had returned to base. But this reporter, apparently more enterprising, gave out with more.

  The pilots were obviously out of their minds.

  “I couldn’t trip the release,” one of them was babbling, according to the fax machine. “The automatics wouldn’t function on proximity. I didn’t bring her back. She brought me back. Something took over the controls of the ship. I didn’t land her, she landed me.”

  In sheer fury, Strickland kicked the machine, and tears formed in his eyes at the hurt to his foot.

  Sheer funk, it was. Sheer yellow funk! Goddamn! What an investigation this would make when it was all over!

  A moment to sober his mood. A moment’s thought.

  The mind in the projectiles hadn’t let him respond to their feelers! They hadn’t let him wipe out a few of their ships, just to show them he could do it. They weren’t opening negotiations with him. They didn’t play the game according to the human rules. If he were willing to sacrifice a million or so of his own pawns, they should have been willing to sacrifice theirs. That was the way the game was always played before the big boys got down to serious business of dividing up the pot.

  For the first time he allowed the doubt to take form: the doubt that they might need him, after all.

  His contemplation was interrupted by a clear, piercing note. It was like a trumpet; no, more like a bugle call. It came through the French windows. It flooded the room with its warm, golden sound. He whirled away from the fax machines and rushed to the garden outside.

  The last, lingering notes seemed to flood the whole city.

  He stumbled out to the edge of the garden, to lean against the parapet while he gazed up into the heavens.

  There were the projectiles, seeming to draw together now. But high above them, apparently so high they still caught the light from the sun below his horizon, a new set of ships had appeared. Each an iridescent globe. They flew in a wing formation, a vast wing. It was like a wing of shining pearls.

  They came closer. They began to shade into iridescent blue.

  And like the star sapphire, even at this distance he could see the symbol on each of them—a shining white cross of radiant light.

  TEN

  Just before the trumpet flooded Washington with golden sound, we were on our way home from the White House conference. The plan was for the Space Cadet driving our staff car to drop Sara off at the building where she shared an apartment with Shirley; then to take me to my hotel; then for the Space Cadet driver to do whatever Space Cadets do when they are not driving staff cars, parading for newsreel cameras, or appearing in television serials.

  The summons to the White House conference had hit me with a gulping surprise. It shouldn’t have. For three days now, and a good share of the hours in the two nights, our department in the Pentagon had been swarming with brass and braid trying to get a line on the psychology of our enemy. Which was natural enough, since that was supposed to be our job.

  Dr. Kibbie was a bitter disappointment. He plain funked it. There was no other interpretation. On that first morning, after the evening strike, it became abundantly clear to me that in spite of all his talk about the rumors of the Black Fleet, he hadn’t really believed in it—that he merely used the rumors to further his con game.

  The other department heads in the Bureau of Extraterrestrial Psychology responded characteristically. In common with government bureau heads generally, they could talk learnedly about the problem so long as it was kept at a distance, but displayed a complete helplessness to cope when it pushed its reality into our faces.

  Somehow, without intending it, I found myself covering up for them, rationalizing their vagueness into something which sounded at least remotely sensible, taking on the burdens of soothing irate and insistent generals and admirals which Kibbie and his other department heads were shunting in my direction. Without intending it, I was rapidly becoming the answer-boy. Only I didn’t have any solid answers, either.

  Word had got around about my previous dealings with psychological oddities. There had been the little poltergeist girl who threw things without touching them, set things on fire without matches. There had been the fake swami who had been the most frightened of all when he learned he really wasn’t faking it. There had been the five lads who had pursued the practice of Gestalt empathy to the point of creating a superentity which controlled them as if they were merely parts of its body (and which, for a time, had controlled the entire production of Computer Research); and finally there had been the Ex-Colonel Logart, sent out from the Pentagon’s own Poltergeist Division, and who had proved the greatest enigma of them all.

  This seemed to make me an authority on alien psychology. Perhaps the experiences had helped. Perhaps, without realizing it, I actually had developed—well, if not an open mind, one which was at least cracked.

  Dr. Gerald Gaffee, Harvard’s gift to the science of vocational guidance for extraterrestrials, turned out to be astonishingly useful. Of course science fiction was now old enough, traditional enough, and therefore respectable enough that it was no longer scorned by the literary elite. And, seventy-eighty years later, Dr. Gaffee had learned, in his early research, what the pioneer writers and fans of that literature had known all along; that not only did it provide the power thrust to enable the mind to take off and soar into the unknown geographies of undiscovered mental continents, but that it was virtually the only way this could be done. He proved surprisingly adept at speculative extrapolation. He proved a most useful assistant, since he had the capacity for picking up the vaguest speculation, expanding it, rationalizing it until it made logical sense.

  That he was probably quite wrong was in itself an asset. The human mind, somehow, seems much more attracted by the false than by the true; and, being wrong, therefore, we were able to satisfy the brass and braid, and send them on their happy way.

  Being wrong in so many ways assisted me in another respect. Since the wrong answers differed so widely in their substance that they couldn’t all be the right wrong, I began to doubt the rightness of any of the wrongs. A little more time and I would have begun to doubt the reality of the ominous discs overhead at all.

  It was in this mood that I talked at the White Hous
e conference. There, in that soundproofed room, presumably not bugged by more than a half-dozen foreign powers, although certainly bugged by our own secret services who would record each word spoken and try to confound its author twenty years later if he began to give trouble, the reality of the maneuvering discs overhead seemed less believable, and the smell of their Evil seemed not to penetrate.

  I had almost convinced the General Staff and the President that, since we hadn’t yet been hurt, only frightened, and didn’t really know these things were our enemy (but only smelled bad enough to raise the hackles on our animal necks), perhaps our best course was to do more sampling, collating, and correlating of statistics, to learn more about them—particularly since we had already shot everything except our ultimate weapon against them without effect.

  It was then that Senator Higgins had been called out of the conference. When he came back, I could see at once that I had lost. With a few terse words, spoken through grim lips which hardly moved, he pointed out that the enemy discs were hovering over every major city of the world, that they were in a position to strike the killing blow without giving us the chance to defend ourselves; and that it was the height of irresponsible cowardice to wait until they had done it.

  It was the semantics of “cowardice,” of course, which turned the tide. Better-to-be-cautious-and-alive-than-brave-and-dead was not a concept of speculative extrapolation comfortable to the military mind. The President, after a shrewd look at Higgins, and an apparently correct interpretation of the message he read in the Senator’s sick eyes, switched polarity with the practiced ease of a winning politician, and added his argument that it was time America recaptured its leadership of the world, that other nations were faltering in the face of duty, and that once more we had opportunity to be First.

  I was peremptorily dismissed with the implication that in the face of all this opportunity I had counseled cowardice, which was no more than might have been expected from a civilian. As a working arrangement it was conceded that I had some kind of commission in the Space Navy, but no one knew, yet, the exact status. Each time the ranking board settled on a rank for me and started the red tape moving through channels, by the time it had cleared I had hired more people in my department than such a rank was permitted to command, so the process had had to begin again. At the time of these proceedings they were up to Semi-Planet Admiral, Rear Side (or, more succinctly, in the words of my Space Cadet chauffeur when he came into the department to tell me the car was ready, “Where is that half-assed Admiral I have to drive to the White House?”).

  I did not know of the General Staff’s decision to use the H-Bomb until later.

  I picked up Sara from the Entourage Waiting Room, and we left. We were being driven by our respectful Space Cadet down an almost deserted street when the trumpet called up yonder.

  With the first note he crimped the wheels sharply over to the curb, braked the car to a halt, and with a gasped, “I gotta report to the Parade Ground,” he slid out of the car and started running down the street. Apparently his Pavlovian response to a bugle call was in good working order, and apparently it had not been contemplated in his conditioning that he might ever be so far away from the parade ground when the bugle called that driving an automobile might have got him there faster. Naturally, since if he were that far away he couldn’t hear the bugle call, could he? So the one-to-one response of “Run when you hear the bugle” had been deemed sufficient. He started running.

  All this was the merest flash in my mind, as Sara and I climbed out of the car, for the golden notes flooding us filled us with an ecstasy to drive out every other thought.

  Sara and I stood there on the curbing and gazed upward into the heavens.

  There were the projectiles, dimly red in the night sky, seeming to draw together now. But high above them, apparently so high they still caught the light from the sun below our horizon, a new set of ships had appeared. Each an iridescent globe. They flew in a wing formation, a vast wing. It was like a wing of shining pearls.

  They came closer. They began to shade into an iridescent blue.

  And like the star sapphire, even at this distance we could see the symbol on each of them—a shining white cross of radiant light.

  “Oh, Ralph,” Sara breathed. “How beautiful! They’re the most beautiful things.”

  “Come on,” I gasped, and pulled at her arm. “Get under cover. They’re going to attack the projectiles!”

  I knew, I don’t know how.

  Standing in doorways, under awnings and canopies, leaning out of windows, the other people knew too. We ran, as people run in a drenching rain, to take shelter under an archway which led into an arcade of shops. Yet, no more than there, joining some others, we turned and craned our heads to look upward again. The protection of the arch was of less value than the sight. We stepped back out into the clear where we might see the whole dome of the sky. All thought of personal safety was lost in the sheer, blinding wonder of the spectacle above. We were dimly conscious that the other people, too, were creeping out of hiding places, to stand in the open streets, rapt in awe.

  The vast wing of iridescent globes, at first so high it was like a piece of jewelry set with pearls, sapphires, opals, was now close. They were swooping downward, but without spin, twist, or obvious force. Somehow this movement without thrust of force heightened the illusion of their serenity. The symbol of their crossed, white lines gleamed brighter now, telling us it was not an effect of the distant sun, but a glow which came from within them, a radiant purity of purpose.

  Yet the red projectiles had not been thrown into panic and confusion by the sudden appearance. Now it became clear to us people in the streets below why the discs had hovered and waited over the city all these hours. Through some source of their own, they must have known that the radiant globes were on their way to attack them. Sharply, with its own effortless burst of speed, but this time sinister rather than serene, the Black Fleet, black in the day and dull ember red in the night, the Black Fleet veered off in a long arc of flight; hurtled westward; formed into tight combat units of four or five ships each; faced around to meet the challenge.

  We had first thought it was the flight of cowardice; now we realized it was the viciousness of the cornered rat.

  Down in the streets below the people murmured their thoughts and hopes and fears to other people, man spoke to man, neighbor to neighbor, without first calibrating the number of pigment cells per square inch of skin, or demanding status credentials. The ground swell of conviction grew that this was not the first time these two alien forces had joined in battle. Had Milton in his dreams of Heavenly Hosts and Satan’s Minions been visited with some reality of this long ago and far away? We knew, everyone knew, this was one of a long series of such engagements.

  There was no question of whose side we were on, who we hoped would win, must win.

  There grew the conviction this was the decisive encounter. This was to be no hit-and-run skirmish, settling nothing. No, this was it.

  Either the Black Fleet must be vanquished or it must be driven so far away that it would never return to threaten Earth’s people again. Where were the scoffers now who doubted that the universe had been constructed solely for the benefit of Man, and that Man, as its Supreme Achievement, must not be harmed?

  On came the star-sapphire globes, huge now that they were near, leveling their dive enough to offset the enemy’s shift to the west. It was obvious that the new path of descent would hurtle them headlong into the discs in a few seconds more.

  Long tentacles of blood light flickered out from the projectiles like the darting tongues of snakes. In and out they flashed, so many they surrounded the discs, creating a deadly, protective screen of twisting, corrosive fire.

  As if they could not stop, or had a courage beyond human comprehension, the vanguard shock unit of the globes smashed into the fire-tipped tentacles. And the impact flooded the streets below with a sound of molten steel being poured into icy water. There was a
flare of intolerable blindness.

  And when our eyes cleared and we could see again…

  There was nothing left of the first wave of globes.

  As if it possessed but one throat, one voice, from the city below there was one long groan of anguish.

  * * * *

  Heroically, the other globes did not hesitate.

  Another wave plunged into the writhing tentacles. This time the blinding flash seemed less. Perhaps, expecting it, we slitted our eyes against its coming? This time the destruction of the new wave of globes seemed not instantaneous, nor did they wink out completely. This time there were vapor clouds billowing white against the black heavens as the second shock unit more slowly disintegrated. It was destruction, but not so easy; perhaps no more than the force of an ordinary atomic bomb. The mushrooming clouds of vapor, boiling upward, seemed the same.

  * * * *

  A third wave of globes came in. Ah, the courage, the guts! From the streets of the city there was the murmur of wonder, hope renewed. The evil rays of the discs seemed weaker the second time than the first, didn’t they? Men asked this of one another and drew comfort from assurance and agreement.

  The discs did not waver in their defensive formation. They seemed to draw a little closer together. A screen of dead! black against the lighter sky flickered first, then joined ship to ship.

  Our murmur of hope changed to a groan of despair.

  Our despair was realized.

  This time there was no sound of molten steel in icy water, no billowing clouds of vapor, no blinding flash of light. At first touch of the shining globes against the dead black blood screen, the globes were no more.

  * * * *

  Yet not in vain. Now we saw one solitary globe still alive, coming from another direction, taking advantage of that instant when the Black Fleet had concentrated all its defensive screen against the wing of onrushing globes, somehow getting behind, inside the defensive screen.

  To loose a violet-white radiance.

  And for a long, interminable, hopeful instant, the radiance persisted. We saw four of the black ships explode into poison-fetid gobbets of rotten offal.