The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  The long legs of the heroes were thrown up over the arms of chairs, their cigarette ashes dropped carelessly upon priceless rugs, their corrosive nightcaps etched rings upon rare table tops.

  They seemed not to know about spy-ray units, microphones, and cameras concealed behind moldings, under chairs, in electrical outlets, through minute openings punched through eye pupils of masterpiece paintings on the wall, through false mirrors placed strategically to cover every square foot of Blair House.

  They seemed unaware that a couple billion people would be treated to their every private move and word—well, nearly every move and word. Certain scratching, certain tugging at cloth cutting into certain body areas, certain remarks; these would have to be expurgated, of course. All right for the censors to observe them, for the censors could be confident that their minds were pure, but no such trust could be placed in those with inferior morals.

  They seemed unaware of the vast satisfaction their behavior would bring to a hundred million moms who would watch them mash down the upholstered arms of chairs, mess up the rugs, ruin the furniture, make grunts and belches just like their own fine sons. Which proved, again, that they were All Right, for here was behavior that even moms could understand. Oh, they would cluck with shocked disapproval at the terrible, terrible upbringing these boys must have had; but they would sigh happily that these heroes didn’t have a thing, not a single thing, which their own fine sons didn’t also have. Anybody could be a hero, it didn’t take anything special. Just luck. The moms could draw vast comfort from seeing that with their own eyes, and compliment themselves that they had done just as good a job as those mothers on—well, wherever these heroes came from.

  The secret services, the supersecret services, the spies who spy upon the spies, wherever a human body could be squeezed into false wall passages, locked closets, basements, attics, and houses next door, all these watched, recorded, and photographed for later analysis. They had begun with narrowed, suspicious eyes; they had savored each remark for hidden, subversive meanings, and gradually they, too, became convinced that these astronauts were, indeed, what they claimed to be—pure and simple representatives from the Right Thinking Universe.

  The conversation of the five was in the tradition of an army barracks. Perhaps an occasional Navy man actually does make a furtive try or so at obtaining some illicit pleasure while ashore, but it takes an Army man to talk about it This portion of their conversation would have to be considerably expurgated, for the social beauties might not like the general public to hear the argued estimates of their milk-gallonage production capacity, and whether or not the daily gallons they advertised were really believable. Probably their conversation did help to reassure the F.B.I. that their sex patterns had been properly oriented and their association with government officials might not contaminate with any positions or movements not on the approved list.

  I did my own share of listening, viewing, analyzing, and wondering, and found I really didn’t have the Peeping Tom temperament required for this work. My status as the world’s foremost authority on extraterrestrial psychology gave me access to the various observing units, but after sampling the behavior of the Starmen, the cloud of avidity radiating from the observers drove me outside, onto the lawn, to clear my lungs with the night’s cool breeze.

  But not an empty lawn or street. Even at this hour of predawn, and after nights of sleeplessness, still there were crowds of people standing outside of Blair House stolidly watching, staring at lighted rectangles of windows blanked by closed blinds or even blanker walls.

  I walked among the silent, staring people, and was on the point of deciding to find some transportation to my hotel when the dark figures of the crowd began to stir, and a low murmur arose from them. I turned and looked at the spot which seemed to have drawn all their eyes.

  It was one of the upper balconies which let through French doors into a bedroom. It began with a glow, a vague nimbus of pearly light.

  The throaty murmur around me was one of awe.

  A form began to take shape within the brightening nimbus of light. At first it was ghostly, symbolizing immateriality. It began to clear, take shape. Now it was a human form. The arms came up and out. The white robe draped the figure and flowed from the extended arms. A face emerged from the nimbus of the head, a Flemish face, with hair long, and blond, and draped in ringlets about the shoulders. The robe glistened now as finest nylon. A halo began to glow about the head.

  Then it was gone.

  The balcony was dark and black.

  The crowd had buckled at the knees. Some were lying prone upon the ground. I looked back up at the balcony angrily.

  “Now what are you practical jokers up to?” I asked bitterly.

  SIXTEEN

  The Miracle at Blair House, as it came to be called, gave Harvey Strickland the assurance he needed.

  He sat, the next morning, in his purple robe at his desk in the suite of offices reserved for him at the Washington Evening Bulletin, and weighed the discrepancies in the vision against their purpose.

  Nylon robe, indeed! His first response to this item in the reporters’ stories had been fury at the sloppy thinking, and some of his reporters came closer than they ever knew to excommunication from the fourth estate. But then he grew curious at the unanimous opinion that the robe was nylon. Odd.

  Odd, also, that a halo was universally reported. Painters didn’t invent the halo for several centuries after the time of Christ. And it was some centuries still more before the anti-Semitic Nordic painters changed the physical appearance to one they liked better. Just as the approved image which came to be accepted had nothing whatever in common with the probably dark and swarthy little Asiatic Jew, so did Christianity evolve into something which had nothing whatever in common with that servile little Jew’s teachings.

  So what motive in presenting this wholly inaccurate vision?

  The goddamn communists had said religion was the opiate of the people. As usual, they were so twisted in their thinking they had even misinterpreted this. Christianity was the most powerful weapon rulers had ever found for keeping the people meek, docile, humble, subservient, asking nothing, expecting nothing, fearing even that if they asked for their rights here on Earth, they might be denied them in Heaven. This was the reason the ancient rulers had shrewdly adopted it as a state policy; this was the reason the modern industrialist enforced it upon his employees, and saw to it that the ministers in his factory towns kept the workers humble, docile, and afraid.

  Suddenly he felt flooded with revelation. The Miracle at Blair House had been their sign to him. “We approve the method of scaring the sheep into submission,” they were saying to him. “We see that there is altogether too damn much independent thinking going on, and it’s time the people were brought back into line.”

  He pushed his huge bulk to his feet and began to pace the space between the desk and the doorway while he thought out the implications behind the act. From their behavior these five had seemed no more than stupid fly-boys, the kind of happy-go-lucky show-offs we might send out after we had taught them to press the right buttons. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. Maybe there was more to them than met the eye, or maybe this was just another button they had been ordered to push, part of a long range pattern.

  It didn’t really matter which. Whether they’d thought it up, or it had been thought up for them, the intended result was clear.

  Here lately there’d been a rash of independent little literary magazines, operating on a shoestring, with appeal to only a few goddamn intellectuals. He’d paid them no attention. Those things usually died out after two or three issues, and the backers saw that they hadn’t changed the destiny of mankind with a couple of editorials. But the rash of them was symptom of increase in independent thinking. Worse, there were mutterings among the scientists that came close to mutiny. Goddamn scientists were getting too big for their britches. They were forgetting they were just hired mechanics, and were trying to tell the
bosses how the shop ought to be run.

  He whirled around and slapped his hand down hard on his desk.

  That was the deal!

  Lest this give anybody ideas about science being more important than sheeplike docility, this arrival of men from the stars, the people were to be reminded of the pasture fences and who drives them with the dogs and whip.

  Well, they didn’t have to hit Harvey Strickland over the head. Now that they had shown him that either they, or the power behind them, knew the score; he’d play their game. Sooner or later, there’d be a showdown of hands across the table—or under it.

  He wheezed his high, gasping laughter, went around the desk, sat back down in the triple-strength chair, and began punching buttons to summon his editorial staff. He grabbed up his phone, called his New York suite, and ordered Miller to come on the next plane.

  He hadn’t wanted Miller with him while he was uncertain of his course. It wouldn’t do for Miller to know he could be uncertain. But now that he knew, Miller must be here to see. He would have considered it complete nonsense if any psychologist had told him Miller, to him, was symbolic of humanity; and that the same jealousy and hatred which had driven him to destroy Miller pressured his drive to humble the contemptible human race.

  That its determined, eternal, beautiful effort to lift its head in pride, in spite of all his efforts and those down through the ages like him to keep it servile and cowardly, was embodied in Miller. Even if he had contemplated the idea, he would have rejected it, for obviously Miller had been completely broken, by him, long ago.

  He would not have admitted, or known, either of the human race or of Miller, that the spark of man’s desire to lift himself up out of the muck, to throw back his head and gaze in ecstasy up to the stars, is never quenched.

  More immediately, it did not occur to him that his secretary, so self-effacing as to be often forgotten, as a good organization man should, had, ignored, stood by his shoulder once too often and watched him work the secret combination to his file room of dossiers.

  That Miller had used his absence from New York, and the excitement of the rest of the New York personnel in its absorption with the doings of the Starmen, to spend long hours in that secret room.

  That Miller had finally found his own dossier, and had read its every word with increasingly comprehending eyes.

  That the dormant spark of pride in Miller had been given the fuel to flame into a raging fire.

  SEVENTEEN

  It was Shirley again, with her manipulations behind the scenes, who filled my following days with woe.

  Long experienced in the empire-building involvements and intrigues of bureaucratic Washington, and well knowing this was done through grabbing the ball of expediency and running with it before anybody else had a chance to get their hands on it, she grabbed the ball and passed it into my hands before I knew what it was.

  Who had a better right to act as intermediary between the Starmen and the deputations and committees of Earthmen than Dr. Ralph Kennedy, the world’s foremost authority on extraterrestrial psychology?

  Let the State Department rant and rave that the Starmen had called themselves ambassadors, and it was their function to handle ambassadors—did they have trained authorities in extraterrestrial psychology to do the job? They did not! All right, we would concede a point. We admitted it was their job to handle Earth ambassadors. So the foreign ambassadors from Earth countries who wanted to call upon the Starmen and pay their respects (and wheedle concessions for their own countries) could go cool their heels in the anterooms of the State Department while their protocol was sorted out, but the State Department would have to deal with us in who actually got in to see the Starmen.

  All right! We would concede that the Commerce Department handled deputations of businessmen, so let the businessmen cool their heels in the Commerce Department while waiting for permission, from us, to wheel and deal trade concessions out of the Starmen.

  All right! Let the Civil Space Authority answer the question of the scientists, “How did you do it?” if they could!

  Shirley solved all this by the simple, and thoroughly familiar to Washington, means of “transmitting orders from above”—without revealing who gave those orders up above. She simply told the guards around Blair House to admit no one but me. She even took on the President’s secretary and came out on top, by hinting darkly about the political repercussions which could result from the President making a premature step through interceding for his court favorites.

  Not even Harvey Strickland would be permitted to see the Starmen without my approval!

  Trouble was, since I’d had no further contact with the Starmen myself, I was hardly in position to start filling their calendar with dates from all these pressing deputations, committees, and individuals.

  I found myself curiously reluctant to step out into the spotlight, for now the entire world sat staring at its television set, which showed the entrance of Blair House and the milling crowds outside the cordon of guards.

  So, the Space Cadets could escort me and make a path through the crowds. So, the guards, upon proper identification, would allow me through the lines. So there I would be, walking up the steps, alone. Watched by two billion people. So I would knock on the door. So I would say, “Please, Mr. Starmen, may I come in?”

  What if they said, “No!”?

  Goddamn you, Shirley, you and your empire-building.

  I delayed putting it to a test as long as I could. My excuse was that I must sample the reactions of the press and television to the Miracle at Blair House.

  The Strickland organization had gone all out. “Down on your knees, you stupid slaves,” was the gist. “Grovel your silly faces in the dust. Lo! We have been given the sign.”

  The more I read the angrier I grew. Not only at Strickland, his motives were becoming pretty clear to me. Not just at the fanatics who were all too willing to jump on the band wagon to increase their importance and their compulsion to destroy all who didn’t acknowledge their ascendancy. But at the Starmen, themselves. What were they trying to do to us?

  My anger supplied the necessary adrenalin to get me on my feet and going.

  It went as I had envisioned. There was, indeed, the escort of Space Cadets. I was admitted through the lines upon verification of the Captain of the Guards that I was one and the same person who had introduced the Starmen to the President, the one exception who was to be admitted to Blair House, and therefore the authentic Dr. Ralph Kennedy.

  I did not knock on the door, shuffle my feet, pull my forelock, make a steeple out of my hands, and pray for admittance. I simply pushed open the door and walked inside. I had considered that they might throw me out bodily, feet flying over head down the steps, with two billion people watching my disgrace, but by now I didn’t care.

  Instead, I was received with that exasperating, “Shucks, Dr. Kennedy, we’re just plain folks. You shouldn’t ought to go to all this trouble, a busy man like you, just to see if we’re makin’ out all right.”

  They were scattered around the breakfast room, in dressing gowns with cloth strained at the shoulders and gathered in folds around the hips—dressing gowns obtained from the wardrobe of Blair House and designed for the more normally proportioned VIP’s who might be expected to visit the Capital—with thin shoulders and fat asses. They were having morning coffee—black; served by the regular servants assigned to Blair House. Their faces were designed to reflect the morning after the night before.

  My disgust with them increased, but I was stopped in my impulse to say what I thought by the knowledge of the spy-rays, microphones, and cameras, and knowing how two billion people would interpret my discourtesy to visitors who were heroes at the very least, and possibly divine.

  “Funny thing about them gadgets,” one of the Spacemen drawled, as a dark man in a white coat, who possessed far more dignity than I, seated me and gave me coffee. “Sometime during the night them gadgets all went out of commission. Them noises you h
ear behind the walls, I reckon they’re not rats—just electronic engineers tryin’ to figger out what went wrong.”

  That much was a relief. But the joker’s stupid country-boy accent and attitude weren’t. I’d caught that highly revealing flash about “art forms of a culture” the day before, and they must have known I’d caught it. So they must also know that I wasn’t taken in by their false faces. So now why the masquerade? With me?

  I didn’t know what their game was. I knew only that so long as they maintained this farce I wouldn’t find out. I’m afraid I boiled over, as soon as the servants had left the room.

  “You come in lies and deceit,” I said, and was surprised to find I was speaking in cold, measured words instead of hot stammering. “I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that you are also self-righteous, knowing what is good for us. And knowing that, capable of any atrocity upon us.”

  There was a blur of faces and forms. For an instant, there was no one in the room with me. Only a vortex of faint, violet light. Then the room was populated again. The boys were still lounging around with coffee cups in their hands. But their faces were not the stupid duh-faces of Earth heroes. There was the faint glow of a nimbus around them.

  It shook me. What kind of fool was I? To stir up what? All right! The worst they could do was blast me out of existence for blasphemy. And that might be preferable to living in the kind of world their behavior was going to create. Their faces were symbols of curiosity now, a wordless invitation for me to go on.

  “The most despicable of all human traits,” I said, “the most cruel and mean, is self-righteousness, the belief that there is some special virtue in ourselves which enables us to decide what is best for others. It provides excuse for anything we may want to do in the destruction of others. We know it well. We should. We’ve had plenty of experience with it. We know it in all its stages of progression. We know it is a contagion and an addiction. We know it to be worse than any narcotic habit, for it can only feed upon forbidding and condemning others in ever increasing doses, to increase its own self-approval.