The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Carmody grinned at him. “You’ve got things twisted, Gogarty. Tom Wills is in charge of this affair.” He turned toward one of the smaller offices. “As I remember it, there should be a transmitting setup in here. I want to make sure it works. If it does, some of the Underwriters are going to get a surprise, unless they’re suspended.”

  Gogarty watched him go, and then sank slowly to a chair, shaking his head as he looked up at me. His lips twisted into bitter resignation. “You wouldn’t understand, Tom. All my life, worked for things. Class-C, digging in a mine, eating Class-D, getting no fun, so I could buy Class-B employment. Then Class-A. Not many can do it, but I sweated it out. Thirty years living like a dog and killing myself with work and study. Not even a real woman until I met Susan, and she went to Defoe. But I wanted it easier for the young men. I wanted everybody to have a good life. No harm to anyone. Pull together, and forget the tough times. Then you had to come and blow the roof off…”

  * * * *

  I felt sick. It was probably all true, and few men could make it. But if that’s what it took to advance under the Company rules, it was justification enough for our fight. “You’ll be all right, Sam,” I told him. “You’ll go to sleep with the others. And when you wake up, you may have to work like hell again, but it’ll be to rebuild the Earth, not to ruin it. Maybe there’ll even be a chance with Susan again.”

  Defoe laughed sardonically. “Very nice, Thomas. And I suppose you mean it. What’s in the future for me?”

  “Suspension until the new government gets organized and can decide your case. I’d like to vote now for permanent suspension.”

  His face lost some of his amusement. Then he shrugged. “All right, I suppose I knew that. But now will you satisfy my curiosity? Just how did you work the business with Bay 100?”

  “What happened to Slovetski?” I asked. I couldn’t be sure about some of my suspicions over Benedetto’s death, but I couldn’t take chances that the man might still be loose somewhere, or else hiding out here until we were off guard.

  He shook his head. “I can answer, but I’m waiting for a better offer.”

  “Sam?” I asked.

  Gogarty nodded slowly. “All right, Tom. I guess you’re the boss now. And I think I’m even glad of it. I always liked you. I’ll answer about Slovetski.”

  Defoe snarled and swung, then saw my rifle coming up, and straightened again. “You win once more, Thomas. Your great international rebel cooperated with us very nicely after we caught him. We arranged for him to receive all calls to his most secret hideout right here in this room. It netted us his fellow conspirators—including your father, Miss dell’Angela!”

  She gasped faintly, but her head came up at once. “Nikolas was no traitor. You’re lying!”

  “Why should I lie?” he asked. “With the right use of certain drugs, any man can become a traitor. And Dr. Lawton is an expert on drugs.”

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “How should I know? He wanted a radioactive world, so I let him enjoy it. We put him outside just before we closed the doors permanently.”

  Gogarty nodded confirmation. I turned it over. He might even have been one of the men waiting outside. But it wouldn’t matter. Without his organization and with a world where life outside was impossible, Slovetski’s power was finished.

  I turned to Zorchi. “The men who broke in will be going crazy soon,” I told him. “While Rena finds the paging system and reassures them they’ll all be treated in the reception room, how about getting Lawton to locate and revive a couple of the doctors you know and trust?”

  * * * *

  Rena came back from the paging system, and Zorchi prodded Lawton with the gun, heading him toward the files that would show the location of the doctors. Gogarty stood up doubtfully, but I shook my head. Zorchi was able to handle a man of Lawton’s type, even without full use of his legs, and I couldn’t trust Gogarty yet.

  “You can give me a hand with Defoe, Sam,” I suggested. “We’d better strap him down first.”

  Gogarty nodded, and then suddenly let out a shocked cry, and was cringing back!

  In the split second when both Rena and I had looked away, Defoe had whipped out an automatic and was now covering us, his teeth exposed in a taut smile. “Never underestimate an opponent, Thomas,” he said. “And never believe what he says. You should have searched me, you know.”

  The gun was centered on Rena, and he waited, as if expecting me to make some move. All I could do was stand there, cursing myself. I’d thought of everything—except the obvious!

  Defoe backed toward the door and slipped around it, drawing its heavy weight slowly shut until only a crack showed. Then he laughed. “Give my love to Millen,” he said, and laughed softly.

  I jumped for the door, but his feet were already moving out of the passage. The door began opening again, but I knew it was too late. Then, it was open. And amazingly, Defoe stood not ten feet away.

  At the other end of the passage, a ragged bloody figure was standing, swaying slowly from side to side, holding a rifle. I took a second look to recognize Nikolas Slovetski. He was moving slowly toward Defoe. And now Defoe jerked back and began frantically digging for the automatic he must have pocketed.

  Slovetski leaped, tossing the gun aside in a way that indicated it must have been empty. A bullet from Defoe’s automatic caught his shoulder in mid-leap, but it couldn’t stop him. He crashed squarely on Defoe, swinging a knife as the other went down. It missed, ringing against the hard floor.

  I’d come unfrozen by then. I kicked the knife aside and grabbed the gun from Defoe’s hands. Slovetski lay limp on him, and I rolled the smaller man aside.

  Defoe was out cold from the blow of his head hitting the floor. Gogarty had come out behind me and now began binding him up. He opened his eyes slowly, blinked, and tried to grin as he stared at the bonds. He swung his head to the figure on the floor beside him. “Shall we go quietly, Nikolas?” he asked, as Gogarty picked him up and carried him back to the private vault.

  But his sarcasm was wasted on Slovetski. The man must have been dying as he stumbled and groped his way toward the place where he knew Defoe must be. And the bullet in the shoulder had finished him. Rena bent over him, a faint sob on her lips.

  Surprisingly, he fought his way back to consciousness, staring up at her. “Rena,” he said weakly. “Benedetto! I loved him. I—” Then his head rolled toward me. “At least, I lived to die in a revolution, Thomas. Dirty business, revolution. When in the course of human events, it becomes—” He died before he could finish. I went looking for Lawton, to make sure Defoe was suspended at once. He’d be the last political suspendee, if I had anything to do with it, but there would be a certain pleasure in watching Lawton do the job.

  CHAPTER XX

  The doors of the reception hall were closed again, but there was no lock now. One of the two doctors whom Zorchi had trusted was there now, waiting for the stragglers who came in slowly as a result of our broadcast. We couldn’t reach them all, of course, but some could be saved. The men who had fought with us were treated and suspended. Even the boy and his dog had finally reached us and been put away.

  In the main room of the executive vault, Carmody was waiting for Rena and me as we came in, haggard from lack of sleep, but somehow younger-looking than he had been since we had first revived him.

  He stood up, managing a tired smile. “The first work’s done, Tom,” he said. “It wasn’t too hard, once they learned Defoe was suspended; a lot of the others were afraid of him, I guess. So far, I’ve only contacted the ones I can trust, but it’s a beginning. I’ve gotten tapes of their delegation of authority to you as acting assistant Chief Underwriter. I guess the factor that influenced them most was your willingness to give up all hopes of suspension for the emergency. And having Zorchi was a help, too—one man like him is worth an army now. I’ll introduce you tomorrow.”

  He stumbled out, heading toward the sleeping quarters.


  Well, I had the chance I’d wanted. And I had his promise to put off suspension until things were running properly. With time to develop a small staff, and with a chance to begin the work of locating the men to study the problems that had to be solved, I couldn’t ask for much more.

  Zorchi grinned at me. “Emperor Weels!” he mocked.

  I grinned back. “If you ever say that seriously, Luigi, I want you to say it with a bullet through my brain. I’ve seen enough cases of power corrupting.”

  For a second, he studied me. “If that day should come, then there shall be the bullet. But now, even I must sleep,” he said.

  Then he glanced at Rena. “I have left orders that a priest should be wakened.”

  She colored faintly.

  “You’ll be best man, I suppose?” I asked.

  This time, even his beard couldn’t conceal his amusement. “Is Zorchi not always the best man?” he asked as he left us alone.

  I stared at the vault that would be my home for the next twenty-five or fifty years—until I was an old man, and the rest of the world was ready to be awakened. “It’s a lousy place to spend a honeymoon,” I told Rena.

  She leaned against me. “But perhaps a good place to bring up children,” she said. “A place to teach them that their children will have a good world, Tom. That’s all a woman ever wants, I guess.”

  I drew her to me. It was a good way to think of the future, whatever happened. And it would be a better world, where the virtues of the Company could be used.

  Probably it wouldn’t be perfect.

  Even the best form of government all the experts could devise couldn’t offer a permanent solution. But it could give men a chance to fight their way to a still better world.

  INTEVIEW: FREDERIK POHL, conducted by Darrell Schweitzer

  Q: I’d like to start by talking about that allegedly forgotten subject in science fiction, the Sense of Wonder, which I find to be very much present in your recent books. They have enormous scope. Some of them, like The World at the End of Time are super-science epics which would have done F. Orlin Tremaine proud. Are you now consciously emulating, in a more sophisticated way, the science fiction you grew up reading?

  Pohl: That may be so. What I think I am doing is writing the kind of science fiction I like to read, of which there is less and less being published. The sense of wonder, the excitement of the colorful, romantic trips to foreign planets, alien beings, and all that, are what I really loved about science fiction when I began to read it. I no longer find that as common as it used to be. Possibly I am as guilty as anybody else because so much of my science fiction has been devoted to what’s wrong with society and why it’s ludicrous, and so forth. But I do miss the excitement of alien creatures doing alien things. I am trying to write that sort of story in a way that does not seriously bother my conscience, by trying to invent some plausible way of getting to these planets, and dsescribing these possibly inhabited planets in more or less scientifically believable terms. I like to think of it as Hard Space Opera.

  Q: I should think that the recent huge advances in space exploration, in computers, in biology, and the possibly of nanotechnology on the horizon should inspire more big, Sense of Wonder type science fiction. It obviously hasn’t. Why? We’ve been finding extra-solar planets, and some of them very odd. That should excite science-fictional imaginations, but most people don’t seem to be going there.

  A: I think most writers aren’t going there. Writers tend to be faddish, and the most recent and most pervasive fad is cyberpunk, so there’s a lot more concern with the future of interlocking human and machine negotiations, the synergy between humans and machines. This is itself interesting, but it does not get you out into the beauty of outer space. Some people still do it. Chip Delany does it once in a while. Vernor Vinge does it beautifully. But I think that most writers tend to write what they think is in vogue at the moment, and I think that interplanetary or interstellar expeditions are not in vogue. Most writers do their best to figure out what an editor will buy and write it.

  Q: You being an editor, did you find that worked, or did you prefer that your writers surprise you?

  A: It worked for me as an editor, but it also worked to surprise me. But a lot of editors were not very permissive. John Campbell and Horace Gold were wonderful editors, but both of them turned down stories because they weren’t the kinds of stories they wanted to do. I never turned down a story on that basis. There wasn’t any kind of story I didn’t want to do.

  Q: Do you think it would be possible to find a new Doc Smith today, or was he only the product of a specific period?

  A: Doc Smith was a product of the time when you could actually believe that a single human being could inadvertently discover something in his laboratory that would allow him to invent a spaceship. Nobody can believe that anymore today. Science isn’t done by individuals. It’s done by huge teams of people. If you look at the magazine Science and see anything really significant about a new advance in physics, for example, the article will be signed by upwards of sixty people, because they are all doing part of the research. The individual inventor, like Richard Ballinger Seaton, doesn’t have a shot anymore.

  Q: I must confess that when I read The Skylark of Space at age 14, which would have been 1966, I didn’t find it very plausible even then. I should think it wasn’t very plausible in 1928 either. The story’s situation is the equivalent of one guy inventing a new airplane fuel, but he also knows how to engineer diving suits, is capable of building the entire airplane, and refine the fuel, and he happens to be a genius at astronomy and biology and mathematics, and so on.

  A: Actually Doc Smith wrote The Skylark of Space in 1917, when it was possible for one person to know how to build an airplane, and know about fuel, and probably know about diving suits, because all of them were still pretty primitive. But you’re right, nobody knows all those things anymore. I can see why it seemed a little implausible to you in the 1960s. It seemed a little implausible to me in the 1930s too, but I didn’t care. I was willing to accept that it was at least possible. Nobody can believe that anymore. The real problem is that we now know too much about our nearby neighbors in space. There isn’t any real estate in the Solar System suitable for an advanced alien culture, so there can’t be any exciting aliens there. Maybe there might be some sort of lifeform on one of the moons of Jupiter or on Mars down in a crevasse, or even on the Moon, in one of the polar craters where there might still be some residual water. But they sure ain’t going to be the kind of people we go and make treaties with. They may be bacilli or something like that. So in order to get to a planet where you can interact with intelligent aliens, you’ve got to go to another star. For that you really need faster-than-light transportation—or people with a lot of time on their hands—and nobody’s going to invent a faster-than-light spaceship in his back yard.

  Q: You’ve gotten around this in various stories.

  A: I do have a little bit of a conscience, though. I do have people whizzing around the universe faster than light every day, but I try to tie it in with tachyons or the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Effect or wormholes. These are things that all have been proposed by respectable scientists as possibly affording some means of faster-than-light travel. They have not, it is true, been proposed by any respectable scientist as a way of transmitting human beings from one place to another. For instance, the wormhole effect may actually be real, but if it is, when you enter the black hole at one end, you are reduced to a thin soup of quarks. You are no longer anything resembling a human being and there is no way to reconstitute you at the other end. Tachyons may or may not exist. They’ve never been found. People have been looking for them for forty years. But even so, they aren’t ever considered to be a way of transmitting human beings. They’re just particles, like photons. You can transmit, possibly, messages, but not people. That’s it. All the things that do go faster than light are not suitable for carrying people.

  Q: Unless one can believe teleportation is
possible. I don’t see how it is...

  A: I don’t see how it is even enough for me to be willing to use it in a story. But that’s a whole other thing. Tomorrow I am flying down to Ft. Lauderdale to give a lecture to a bunch of skeptics, about why such things as teleportation and telekinesis and telepathy and remote viewing and flying saucers and all those things really do not deserve to be believed in. Personally, I don’t believe in anything that I cannot see demonstrated, or that someone whose intelligence I respect proposes as being demonstrable.

  Q: Isn’t the distinction we make in science fiction, as opposed to real life, that you pretend that someone can demonstrate it? As long as the characters in the story can do it scientifically, then you can get away with it. Thus when John Carter wished himself to Mars by magic, that won’t do, but if your character has mastered a whole new range of biology and physics, then it would. Would you agree with this distinction?

  A: I would accept it in somebody else’s story as a necessary device to get the people to where he wants them to be, but I wouldn’t use it in a story of my own, because there are too many people who believe that such things are possible. I do not want to reinforce what I consider to be damaging faiths.

  Q: I think this may be a problem that fantasy writers of conscience face more often than science fiction writers, that you may be encouraging socially harmful credulity.

  A: It’s not just the harm to the society, it’s the harm to the individual who develops an antipathy toward reason because of the fact that these things are defined as beyond reason. So, I think that people who do not think rationally, in terms of reasoning from cause to effect, are likely to further deprave the state of society.

  Q: I suppose the ultimate recent example would be the Heaven’s Gate people.