The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “You come to us in lies and deceit. You probably have even rationalized already that such lies and deceit are for our own good—the first stage of addiction to self-righteousness. You are, even now, probably trying to decide what is best for us. Your behavior seems to indicate you already think you know what is good for us. When will you go into the next stage of self-righteousness and start punishing us for not behaving the way you think we should?”

  Again the blur, again the violet glow of whirlpool, again the curious faces around me. There was no country-boy drawl when one of them spoke.

  “When one of your biologists wishes to study a life form,” he said in emotionless tones, “he first tries to measure all the elements in its environment. But this study does not reveal to him the tolerances of variation in that life form, nor does it reveal the potentials he suspects may be hidden within it. He enters the medium in which the culture exists, by, let us say, increasing the temperature, changing the chemical compound slightly, altering the environment to determine the potentials of reaction in the life form. He probably hasn’t the slightest concern, at this point, for what is ‘good’ for the life form, or ‘bad’ for it. He simply wants to know what it is, how it behaves, how it might behave.”

  “And,” I interrupted, this time a little hotly, “if he finds out we don’t like it, we set about finding a way to destroy it”

  They hit me then.

  Oh, not with a brawny hero’s sadistic fists. They did not gun me down with impunity and praise because they were on the right side.

  They hit me with a vision.

  I saw the universe as I had never before conceived it. For an instant I knew the vastness of infinity, the trillions and quadrillions of whirling dead worlds, a vastness of emptiness so overwhelming that the mind cannot grasp the whole of it—and lifeless.

  Only here and there, in such pitifully small quantities as to be only a trace element was there life in any form—and, of that, an even tinier amount evolved to self-awareness.

  And then I saw Earth; with its surface teeming, crawling, squirming with multitudes and myriads of life forms; each in life/death struggle with all the rest for survival and room to grow. No wonder, to us, life was cheap. No wonder, to us, the way to win was destruction of our opposition. Our values were formed on a world where there was too much life for the space it could occupy.

  Their values were formed by a universe almost totally devoid of life—where every scrap of it was so precious that its right to survive must transcend all else, the right to be must transcend the difference in being.

  They did not know which was the Right form of life, and which the Wrong form. Such concepts had no meaning. They did not know which should become ascendant and which should be suppressed; for they did not know what the future destiny of life, any kind of life, was to be. They did not know it of us, they did not know it of themselves. They did not know of any right to harm us; or we, coming out to the stars, to harm them.

  They did not know.

  I did not know how or when I left them there in the breakfast room—again appearing to be duh-loafers sprawled around sipping morning coffee.

  They tell me that while I was there, for something like an hour, the crowds had massed in increasing numbers, to press tighter and tighter against the cordon of guards. They tell me that when I came out of the door the crowd, which had been growing noisier, hushed. They tell me I walked as one in a trance. They tell me that even Strickland, purple-faced near apoplexy in his argument with the guards, demanding admittance, fell silent, and clamped his lips in a thin line. They tell me that, as I walked through the line, my eyes were fixed on something out of this world, and that the crowd, somehow, pushed back to open a path for me—wide enough that none touched me.

  They tell me that, on the outskirts of the crowd, I stepped into the first limousine I reached—which wasn’t mine—and that the chauffeur, without a word, closed the door and drove me straight to the Pentagon.

  I came to, sitting at my desk, with Sara telling me that the deputations of politicians, businessmen, and even some scientists were still waiting for me to tell them when they were scheduled to interview the Starmen.

  I shook my head, as if coming out of a sleep.

  “I don’t know,” I said vaguely. “I didn’t think to arrange anything.”

  “But, boss,” she wailed. “You have no idea what we’ve been going through trying to stall off those people!”

  “Oh darn, oh gracious, oh fudge,” I said. “To heck with those people!”1

  EIGHTEEN

  Meanwhile, back at the office, things had not stood still.

  I had no more than introduced the Starmen to the President than Central Personnel suddenly discovered that somehow it had made the mistake of cutting my employee requisitions in half, and that in view of my obvious change in status the credit they might receive for all that money they were saving the taxpayers might measure somewhat less than the blame for not giving me the help I asked. They hurriedly rectified this by sending more than a thousand new employees to us, in one day’s time—each carrying a back-order reference to a given requisition.

  Shirley was fit to be tied. But she arose to the occasion by appealing to Dr. Kibbie for assistance in finding still more space to hold them and orienting them to their new jobs. Apparently he was willing and eager to help, and to offer the help of all his other departments as well. We were making use of that two billion very nicely, and he had received word from a congressional committee that even though Congress was not officially in session all members were in town, and if we needed any more spending money they could get some of the boys together within an hour. Dr. Kibbie did not refuse. Shirley’s request for him to take on some of the burdens, and actually do some work around here, came as a boon to him.

  Mine was the department where the spotlight was shining. He was only too glad for the opportunity to move back into the spotlight, after he had flubbed earlier chances so miserably. If it seemed that I had started out working for him and now he was working for me—well, that’s Washington.

  Shirley had done a couple other things to pull the reins of control tightly into our hands. Telephone switchboards were removed from Blair House and all calls were routed through our office; or rather, stopped at our office. All mail and telegrams were routed to our office. She closed off every approach to the Starmen except through us—through me.

  Dr. Gerald Gaffee, the second member of my original staff of three, was not far behind her. He, too, in his own field, had become the man of the hour; and arose to its challenge. With a singular lack of self-doubt and conflict, which usually keeps the intellectual impotent to accomplish anything, he drafted every available scientist to assist him in calculating the probable civilization of these Starmen to pad out the bales of news releases demanded of us; for page after page and hour after hour of print and discussion must be filled. There was no news of any other kind worth printing or talking about.

  The scientists were delighted. As rapidly as they could, they turned off their Bunsen burners, cooled their retorts, balanced their equations, set aside their drawings, and flocked to his aid. When he matched them credential for credential, hauteur for hauteur, they fell to work with a sigh of deep satisfaction. Accustomed as they were to being low man on the totem pole, bottom of the status barrel, victims of every vagrant breeze that blew in cultural whims, they had grown practiced in seizing every fleeting opportunity to add a little more to mankind’s knowledge of the world and universe about him before a change in whim cut them off at the pockets, or a new program of anti-science in the culture quietly eliminated them.

  A skilled archaeologist, himself finding the fragment at the site dig, can deduce an entire culture from a single shard. To do this, they must have known that. To know that could happen only after they had progressed through these and these stages of cultural growth. Buried at this level, in this climatic condition, required this much passage of time. Or, finding this shard at this site
, instead of halfway around the world where it should have been found, presupposed an intercontinental trade among these earlier people, which, in turn, measured the level of civilization they had attained. All from a piece of shard—and astonishingly accurate in estimate, when later discoveries come to light. (Or, are later discoveries rearranged to confirm the first?)

  Here they had no isolated shard. They had had days of watching, first the discs, then the globes, the battle with its incredible denials of the laws of inertia, the globe which had come to rest briefly at the Mall before it suddenly disappeared, the shape and clothing of the occupants—the speech of the occupants which they must have learned from a Western movie television-wave trapped by their instruments, the correct (well, in so far as West Texas speech can be considered correct) semantic meanings to the words they had uttered. Here was such an abundance of observation and evidence that deduction was mere child’s play—at least deduction at the level understandable to the people.

  Their scientific deductions even brought them dangerously close to the forbidden areas of the humanities. For they deduced two massive galaxial civilizations strung out among the stars and galaxies of stars, at war, one Evil, one Good.

  The discs were Evil, because they had threatened us. The globes were Good, because they had saved us. The scientists fell into the humanities routine of morals and ethics without even knowing they had done it.

  They did not go on to spell out that mankind’s morals and ethics are based solely in expediency and have no other source of origin; that which favors his survival is Good; that which threatens his survival is Evil. The universe was created around man, for his benefit and no other purpose. It surrounds him, he is at its center, and all things in it relate to him in terms of Good, or Evil. In the humanics, man is still in the Ptolemaic age and has not yet reached, or come close, to that level of rational thinking where a humanic Copernicus can emerge.

  And therefore the scientists bought themselves a few more days of toleration from the humanists, by, once again, not challenging the arbiters of right and wrong.

  These bales of news handouts kept reporters and commentators off our necks for the moment. But the insistence of other deputations, each with its own expedient fish to fry, was growing in volume and number.

  Oddly, there were no church deputations. Perhaps the churchmen prefer their miracles be kept long ago and far away. Perhaps that bogus miracle at Blair House filled them with dread that the Judgment Day was at hand—a Judgment Day few of them really believed would ever come, when they would be called to account for what they had done with that stewardship handed to them so long ago. At least, so went the comment around the department when the absence of such deputations was realized.

  One other little development of a minor nature had also been making progress. With incredible speed, work, and skill, which can only come through complete dedication and psychotic drive, N-462 had now completed his proof that I was not the real Dr. Ralph Kennedy (who was still teaching a vague class at a vaguer college somewhere in the Mid-West, and never knowing how much he was missing just because some clerk in Space Navy got the files mixed up), but only a Mr. Ralph Kennedy, an imposter.

  Following the accustomed police pattern, he calculated the various avenues of advantage to himself, brought the proof of my imposture to me first—and held out his hand.

  “Hell!” I exclaimed after I’d looked it over. “I’m not going to pay hush on a half-cooked job like this. If you’d used more sense and less venom you’d have checked Space Navy, Personnel Department, Section of Files beginning with the letter K. There you’d have found a recording of my telephone call, which I made when I first got their letter telling me they’d court-martial me if I didn’t show up in forty-eight hours. You’d have found I told them and told them that I was the wrong man.

  “If you’d interviewed the people I saw, in person, after I got here, and used the proper thumbscrews and rubber hoses in the approved police manner, they’d have finally admitted that I told them again and again I was the wrong man.

  “They’re the ones who made the mistake. They’re the ones who insisted. They’re the ones who threatened me into taking the job. I know how we’re supposed to tremble when you look in our direction, I know how easy and how often you cook the evidence to suit your whims, but I’m not going to pay off on a lousy job like this.”

  “I know who will pay off,” he said. He tried to bully me with his eyes. “The Strickland reps have already approached me, and about half the rest of the people in your department, trying to get something on you. They’ll pay plenty for this.”

  “Sell it,” I answered instantly. “Don’t pass up your big chance, man. Sell it for enough so you can retire and write your memoirs about what a good boy you were when you were an undercover agent for, whatever you are an undercover agent for. Sell it to finance you while you tell us how you boys are our big brothers, how you should be let lead us by the hand, how nothing should be put in your way, least of all such a silly little thing like human rights.

  “Sell it. Meantime, I’ll ask the Starmen if it makes any difference to them whether I’m a Doctor or a Mister. If they don’t want me as their go-between you’ve got yourself a big deal. But if they do want me—well, I don’t know if you’d noticed, but I saw what they could do to their enemies.” His eyes were no longer cold and bargaining. He fled. That left, of the central corps, only Sara to bully me about not making any appointments with the Starmen—a job any secretary ought to be able to do. Certainly the world’s foremost authority on extraterrestrial psychology ought to be able…

  “Awright, Sara!” I finally snapped back. “Stop nagging. We’re not married yet, you know!”

  Her eyes grew big.

  Come to think of it, I guess that’s something else I hadn’t thought to take care of when I should.

  NINETEEN

  I might stand on the smear slide and shake my fist in resentment at the eye looking down through the microscope at us, but it had no apparent effect on the biologists who were stirring up our environment to test the potentials of our reaction.

  The next exasperating move of the Starmen was reported on the television set in my office. I’d left the thing turned on because even my brief visit with them had given me another perspective. Now I was looking at the antics of the human race as they might appear to a detached, alien mind in curious observation.

  Out of nowhere the star-sapphire globe suddenly appeared again, this time over the street in front of Blair House. There was panic pressure in the crowds of people directly beneath it, but the perimeter crowds were pressing inward to get closer this time. They could not move out of its path of descent.

  I watched in apprehension mixed with some sardonic satisfaction. This time the Starmen, those lovable boys, Bex, Dex, Jex, Kex, and Lex, must reveal that the globe was an unsubstantial illusion, or they must crush the people beneath and violate their own precepts of not harming another life form.

  They solved their dilemma, but not mine, by performing another miracle. I might have known they’d not hesitate to impress the yokels with their magic.

  They came through the doorway of Blair House, again dressed in their resplendent uniforms, again with those irrepressible boyish grins on their handsome faces. They grouped together there at the entrance. The crowd fell silent. The leader, I suppose it was Bex, spoke familiarly with the crowd.

  “Folks,” he said, and without seeming to strain his voice reached the outermost limits of the crowd, “I reckon we oughta clear up a little mistake we made. The other day that recording we played said we was here as ambassadors. Well, shucks, we’re not. I guess, back on our world, ambassador means something different from here. We didn’t know we’d be insultin’ anybody by not meetin’ with all the ambassadors from all your countries.

  “And we’re not in any position to make any deals with anybody about anything. So that’s why we asked Mr. Kennedy not to put us down for talks with all you people of importance
.”

  (They came in lies and deceit. They hadn’t asked me any such thing. The matter hadn’t even come up. Still, I breathed a sigh of relief.)

  “You might say”—Bex continued to sell his winsome personality—“instead of being ambassadors, we’re more like—well, tourists. We don’t want to disappoint nobody, but that’s kinda what we’d like to do a little more of.

  “We’re gonna tour around now, to see a little more of this beautiful world of yours; that is, if you don’t mind. We figger we oughta see the country a little before we go back home. Maybe we can figger out how to give you a helping hand here and there. You might say we’re a kind of Youth Peace Corps—in a small way, that is.

  “We want to thank you for the nice reception and the nice parties you gave us yesterday, but we hope it won’t hurt nobody’s feelin’s if we hafta turn down any more invitations. We’re not used to all this celebratin’, we’re just plain fightin’ men.

  “You keep in touch with Mr. Ralph Kennedy at the Pentagon about us, he’s a mighty fine fella, and we certainly appreciate all the valuable time he’s given us. We’ll keep in touch with him too, long as we’re visitin’ here on your fine world.

  “We’ll be back before we hafta go home. So long, now.”

  A rainbow suddenly sprang out of the side of the hovering globe and placed its end at their feet. They marched up the rainbow and entered a hatch which opened at their approach. The blue glow from within the ship was cut off as the hatch closed again.

  And there was no ship there.

  Some claimed stoutly that they were able to follow its incredible speed up into the heavens; some confused specks before their eyes with the dot of the globe disappearing into the blue.

  I had an idea it was something else; some movement perfectly normal to the experimenting biologist, inconceivable to the germs on the smear slide. But why bother to explain themselves to the germs? To keep the environment as “natural” as possible, within controlled conditions, changing only those things they wished to alter?