The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Personally, I wished they’d make up their minds. What were they? Ambassadors, tourists, fightin’ men, Youth Peace Corpsmen? Each role required a different response from us, each label carried its own set of expected behaviors.

  This was a question I felt Dr. Gerald Gaffee and his phalanx of semanticists might wish to ponder. He and I had grown friendlier since that first meeting, and when I walked into his office this time, I was a little surprised that the original icy hauteur was back. The two scientists with him, both of international renown, looked at me with open hostility. Then I realized.

  Twice the Starmen had referred to me in this latest speech of theirs, and both times as Mister. I was a Mister who had been posing as a Doctor. I was beneath contempt. Nothing was said, of course. Nothing needed be.

  I had made up my mind to tell them, before they went out on the limb too far in the speculations of these Good and Evil Galaxial Civilizations, that they’d better also take into consideration that the whole thing had been a staged illusion. I changed my mind now. I knew from experience that anything a layman might say could not possibly be credited.

  And, anyway, what difference would it make to the biologist what one germ on the smear slide thought of another?

  “Never mind,” I told him, and walked out without mentioning why I had interrupted their important conference in the first place.

  We heard nothing from the Starmen, or no reports of their whereabouts, for two days. This didn’t mean we heard nothing about them. There was page after page, hour after hour of hash and rehash.

  The newest miracle of Walking on a Rainbow stirred and disturbed us even more than the balcony scene that first night at Blair House.

  Now, for the first time, we took public note that in the battle between the globes and discs there had been no debris to fall upon us. It was another miracle.

  That the discs had almost won, then suddenly turned coward and fled was a miracle.

  That our tracking equipment and scientific instruments generally had failed to work, failed to confirm what our eyes and noses, our ears and tactile senses had told us was real—this was a miracle.

  Even Horace Thistlewaite, Night Manager of the Sheridan House, New York, came in for his hour. The entire front page of one edition of the newspapers was given to his story; of the bellhop who saw five guys only it was one guy, then a purple whirlwind, the footprints in the carpet that wouldn’t brush out, the broken bed, the scorched stain on the wall. It had happened before the Starmen had arrived on Earth; therefore, it couldn’t have happened. And didn’t that make it a miracle?

  “First thing you know,” I said sourly to Sara, “we’ll be like the mountain Indians of Latin America. A tourist drives through a village at the breakneck speed of fifteen miles an hour and doesn’t kill anybody. It is a miracle. The sun shines through a rift in the clouds and lights up a Mariposa lily on the hillside. It is a miracle. A man wakes up in the morning, after he had dreamed he was dead. He is alive. It is a miracle.”

  She looked at me without committing herself.

  “Accept as basic premise that by individual whim we can suspend the natural law of the entire universe, and anything you want to name becomes a miracle,” I said.

  “What natural law would you use to walk on a rainbow?” she asked me.

  “Now, Sara,” I chided. “That’s like saying, ‘If you’re so smart why ain’t you rich?’ Hell, I don’t know all the natural laws there are. Nobody on Earth does. Maybe the Starmen know some natural laws we don’t know, and maybe they don’t know all there are, either. But that doesn’t mean because we don’t know the natural law, there isn’t one.”

  “So you believe in natural laws you don’t understand, and others believe in miracles they don’t understand—and what’s the difference?”

  “We can never understand the miracle. Someday we can understand the natural law. That’s the difference.”

  “The miracle is easier,” she said lightly. “Think of all the scientific study you have to do to understand natural law.”

  “Oh, Sara,” I groaned. “You too?”

  “So what kick do you get out of being such a cynic?” she asked. “If we want miracles, what’s wrong with miracles?”

  I started to answer with the old bromide, “Only the broken-hearted idealist can become a cynic,” but it sounded too corny and too complicated.

  “What have you got there? Papers for me to sign?” I asked, instead. “Anyway the heat’s off on all the clamoring deputations,” I added.

  “There’s that,” she agreed fervently, and began pointing out the line where I must write my name.

  * * * *

  In two days, a new series of miracles began.

  The biologists began to mess up the culture they were studying in earnest. First news came from Western United States. From Austin, Texas, to the barren shores of the Pacific in Baja California, and upward to the badlands of the Dakotas and on upward into Canada, subterranean streams of water geysered to the surface overnight. The water was as fresh as that from mountain springs. It was seeping into the desert lands, flowing through the arroyos, forming lakes in box canyons, forming its own interwoven network of irrigation ditches. Within weeks the entire desert would be green with growing plants. Within a year, millions of new acres would become rich farmlands.

  Let the Agriculture Department groan about its already too expensive surplus crops. It was a miracle.

  Only the lag in communications, caused by lines clogged with diplomatic recriminations for our hogging the Starmen all to ourselves and trying to extend Yankee imperialism to the entire universe, prevented us from knowing at once that the desert regions all over the Earth were receiving like treatment.

  News came from the Sahara region next, then the Arabian desert, the parched plains of India, then the Gobi. Australia was furious for being treated as if she were down under until suddenly her whole interior became a network of canals, streams, and lakes.

  Brazil was in the act of complaining that just because she had no deserts was no reason why she should be deprived of her share of miracles, when word came that the vast Amazon region had been penetrated with networks of clearings and highways to checkerboard her many thousands of square miles of jungle. Almost in the manner of mycelium growth, the clearings spread up into Central America and momentarily stopped those people from shaking angry fists toward the north and south. Interior Africa and the jungles of Southern Asia next reported.

  Russia was reaching new heights of bad manners until she noticed that the snows of Siberia were melting to release more millions of square miles where more comrade workers could refuse to grow enough grain to feed the toiling masses who had little personal incentive to toil. Greenland, Canada, and the State of Alaska hardly had time to draft protests before the same phenomena caused them to tear up the drafts.

  There was a week of this. Hardly more than enough time for the land speculators to recast their investment programs to cash in on these profitable miracles. Hardly time for people to start packing their goods for the biggest land rush in all history—hardly time for governments to pass laws telling the people they couldn’t do it, not until the land investors had got set for profit taking. Hardly time for Russia to wonder where she would send her variant thinkers now that Siberia was a potential paradise. Hardly more than time for us in the Pentagon to do more than keep statistics on authenticated and rumored miracles.

  If economists expressed alarm over the disruption of normal trade, if scientists expressed alarm at the potential ocean-level rise because of all these melting snows, nobody heeded. Economists are about as accurate as weather forecasters or horse-race handicappers, and who pays any attention to scientists where there are miracles?

  United States did find time to do a little muttering in Uncle Sam’s beard. Figured on an area-for-area basis, certain other countries were receiving more miracles per square miles than we, and was that fair? Of course we were still ahead on a per capita basis—and so how
you looked at it depended on whether you wanted to complain or brag.

  Yes, indeed, the Starmen were varying the chemistry of the culture on the smear slide.

  I looked at these changes with dread. They were so vast, with consequences beyond imagining—while man can tolerate only the smallest of change at any one time.

  …It took a thousand years, fifteen hundred years, of placing the holy image exactly in the center of the canvas before man could tolerate the blasphemy of placing it slightly to one side.

  …For fourteen hundred years Ptolemy’s astronomic system of placing the Earth at the center of the universe satisfied the vanity of man, including his astronomers, before the courage of Copernicus to say it might not be so. And four hundred years after Copernicus, in the scientifically enlightened year of 1958, one third of American high-school students still believed the Earth to be at the center of the universe.

  …Change one word on the label of a product, and although they cannot read it, five hundred million Chinese will refuse to buy it. How ignorant can those natives be? But—

  …Oh yes, we once tried to put this thick catsup in a wide-mouth bottle so it would pour easily, and the company almost went broke—the American housewife refused to touch it because the shape of the container had been changed. It has taken us fifteen years to enlarge the neck of the bottle by one quarter of an inch. And—

  …It takes ten years to change the lapel line of men’s suits.

  …Oh yes, we like to see fresh, new ideas and treatment in stories, but we can print only those exactly like those we have printed in the past.

  …A popular song must be written in exactly thirty-two measures. State the theme in eight. Repeat it in the second eight. Bridge with another eight. Repeat the theme for the final eight. Otherwise a musician cannot play it, the people cannot learn to sing it.

  …A man may take one step ahead of his culture and chance being called a genius. But if he takes two steps, he is certain to be called a menace, a madman, a fool.

  …The humanist does not make even one step ahead, and thereby maintains his secure control of men’s minds. No one knows, or cares, how the scientist thinks, so long as he continues to make things easier without really changing anything. So he may say, “If my theory doesn’t work it must be wrong, and I must recast my notions about the true nature of this until I find a theory which will work.” If he gets any kick out of confounding himself with all this self-doubt, he’s welcome to it so long as he doesn’t disturb the certainties of the rest of us. But the humanist says, “I cannot be wrong. If my theory doesn’t work someone else is at fault and must be punished.” In all man’s history there has been taken not one single step forward from this attitude among the humanists.

  And so I looked at these changes caused by the Starmen, and dreaded.

  I should have known better. Past experience with a quarter million individuals should have taught me. I should have known that a man can receive only what his mind has been prepared to receive, that all else is ignored, or interpreted to suit his prior interpretation—that man can only accept change through it being interpreted as no change, or not knowing it is change.

  Apparently I needed a reminder. Sara brought it into my office in the form of sample mail we were receiving—mail addressed to the Starmen, routed through us.

  Our department’s mail room had done an excellent job of classifying the letters according to type. There were some forty-six thousand letters and telegrams represented by the following:

  “My corn patch is gittin purty dry. Rain on it. Yrs trule.

  There were only four thousand five hundred antonym letters in this category:

  “Urgent you not let it rain on Ladies Aid picnic for worthy cause.”

  A few hundred said something like:

  “Have twenty dollars with bookie on long-shot, Sea War, in the second. 50/50 split with you if you make him win.”

  Some six thousand pleaded with them to use brand products in their next personal appearances, or came within the following patterns:

  “Enclosed find eleven genuine simulated gold embossed lifetime passes to any theater showing our pictures. Usual requirement that you give your independent, unbiased opinion that picture is stupendous, colossal, gigantic applies. Lifetime passes absolutely guaranteed good for ninety days. Cancelable without notice.”

  “Request you furnish our department-store chain with one gross real live Santa Clauses for coming Christmas season. Must have real ones. Kids are wise to phonies, pull off their beards and kick them in shins for not keeping last year promises. Causes much union grievance. For your information, enclosed is traditional editorial telling why belief in Santa Claus is necessary—and which says nothing at all about how sales would drop off, factories shut down, and newspaper (which carries the editorial) advertising space cut down without said belief. Absolutely necessary our citizens be kept believing there is a Santa Claus. As twig is bent tree will grow. Fight communism. Send us real Santa Clauses, We pay union scale.”

  Unfortunately, statistics on the following kind of letter were incomplete, since loyal mail clerks had been tearing them up before it was realized we should keep an impartial check:

  “Toiling masses greet their comrades from space. Party requires you make unmistakable statement against grasping capitalists within next twenty-four hours. No excuses, or you know what.”

  But there were one hundred and twenty-four thousand letters of the following kind:

  “Eyes of blue, five-feet two, Bette Lou, and she’s pretty too. That’s just a little rime the boys made up to teese me with, and I guess it does tell you what I’m like, but it didn’t make me stuck up, not a bit. I don’t think if a girl is inteligunt and beautiful, crushinglly divistatinglly beautiful she doesn’t need to be stuck up. Do You? Anyway Im not, not a bit, stuck up I mean.

  “I feel it is my sacred duty to write you and tell you what the nice girls in my town are saying about you, and everybody will be saying it soon, but everybody, if they arent allready. I guess you know we have been keping pretty close tabes on you fellas, ha! ha!

  “Seriously, we watched you go to bed, and we watched you get up, whenever the TV was working, when you was here. I guess you know everybody in the world is keping watch out for you, so if youd done what regular fellas do, I guess we’d know about it. Like I said, people are begining to talk.

  “Youve been here more than a week now, and none of you fellas have gone to bed with any girls, if you know what I mean. So I guess you know from that what people must be saying about you, if you know what I mean. I dont beleev it, what theyre saying about you, if you know what I mean. Anyway, even if you were, well if you found out what it was like to have a real feminin girl, if you know what I mean, you wouldn’t be any more.

  “Anyway that is why I think it is my scared duty. You wouldnt have to marry me afterwards, if you know what I mean, that is, if you didnt want to. But Ill bet youd want to after you found out how much fun you could have with a real feminin nice girl, if you know what I mean. Ha! Ha!

  “I hope I havent been to suttle about what I mean if you know what I mean. But Im a nice girl and nice girls dont come right out and tell men what theyre always thinking about. Theres only one of me and theres five of you fellas, but dont fight. Just draw straws or something. I have got lots of nice girl friends. They are not as cruchinglly beautiful as I am, but they are real feminine girls and All Right, if you know what I mean.

  “Some people are saying you fellas are angles from heaven. If you are angles then thats why you havent gone to bed with any girls because angles arent suppose to know about such things, if you know what I mean. So if you dont take me up on my Supreem Sacrafise I wont believe what people are saying about you not being regular fellas, if you know what I mean. IE believe its because you are angles and my feelings wont be hurt a bit. Well not much anyhow, because there are plenty of nice boys around here Ill have you know, and there allright too, and I dont have to throw myself at nobo
dy, if you know what I mean.

  “So as they say if you want it come get it or Ill throw it in the garbage, if you know what I mean. But if youre angles then you dont know what I mean. Cruchinglly, devistatinglly yours,”

  I looked up from reading the last letter. I looked a question at Sara, who was sitting across the desk from me. I asked a question with my eyes.

  “Yes,” she answered. “I’ve read them. Quite a few more like them, just to see if they were representative, as the mail room claims.”

  I wondered if my face showed the same inner sickness as hers.

  “People,” I commented unhappily.

  “People,” she agreed.

  “Whether it’s some kind of science we don’t understand, yet, or miracles we’ll never understand, it doesn’t change a thing,” I said. “I thought it was really going to bollox up the works, but it doesn’t. Before the Starmen, people looked to science for miracles. They didn’t know how the scientist got them, they didn’t want to know, they didn’t listen when he tried to tell them. All they wanted was the miracle, not a lot of instruction which would be work to understand. Well, now they’ve got the miracles from another source, without any instruction on how to go and do likewise. But there’s no real difference, no real change from then to now.”

  “I guess people will go right on being people,” she agreed, as if that would comfort me.

  * * * *

  Apparently Shirley, and Dr. Gerald Gaffee, and Dr. Kibbie had also been busy, behind the scenes, working for my comfort.

  The three of them walked into the office, at that moment, without appointment. The two men had broad, happy grins for me, and file folders of papers in their right hands. Shirley’s beautiful, old homely face was wreathed in misty smiles, and she was looking at me as a mother might look at a favored son. She also carried a file folder in her right hand, and a big dry-goods box in under her left arm. I wondered fleetingly if her motherly instincts had gone so far as to start buying suits for me.