Joe tried to tell her. He was very earnest about it. But when he was by himself, sometimes he doubted the accuracy of the descriptions he gave her. It had been a long time since he’d seen a sky or the sun or trees, or grass, or even the stars as they look from the bottom of Earth’s ocean of air.
The Mavourneen floated on through emptiness toward Earth. Around her the stars shone by myriads of myriads. Some were brighter than others, and some were yellow and some were blue and pink and even green. But none was larger than any other. All were pinpoints—unwinking and infinitely small.
All but the sun.
That had visibly a disk when theMavourneen crossed the orbit of Uranus. Not that Joe saw the planet, nor did Alice Cawdor, the girl. As a matter of fact, Uranus was around on the other side of the sun and was not seen even by the officers and crew-members who had occasion to enter the control room and look out of its ports. Saturn was visible, but the ship would not pass within hundreds of millions of miles of it. There was not much excitement even in duty in the control room of the Mavourneen.
The firmament gave no impression of distance. It looked like an all-encompassing backdrop in which someone had prickled countless tiny holes through which lights shone. There was the sun ahead, but it was merely a distinct bright light of small but appreciable size. Navigating the Mavourneen was merely a matter of working controls so that dials would read what mathematics said they should. One had no feeling of movement or adventure.
The ship passed the orbit of Saturn. Back on Earth, Joe’s mother began to find it more difficult to sleep. Joe might be home in two months more. If nothing had happened . . . Joe’s father smoked too much. But he would have grinned at the suggestion that he worried about Joe. Joe was all right. Of course!
Then Jupiter and the sun and theMavourneen were at the three corners of an equilateral triangle, if anybody cared. The ship had been decelerating for a long time when she reached that point and kept on sunward toward the orbit of Mars. She continued to decelerate. The only noteworthy thing that turned up in Joe’s life was that he discovered Alice did not know that on Earth everybody went to sleep at night. Without really thinking about it, she’d assumed that life on Earth was like life on Pluto, and that people were awake and slept in shifts—as on Pluto—and that there was always brightness outside one’s room and somebody up and about and working or amusing themselves. She found it frightening to think of everybody asleep at once. It seemed to her that somebody ought to be on duty to make sure there was light and heat and air. On Pluto there was.
Joe felt a sort of compassionate protectiveness toward her now. He told her about his family, and assured her that his mother would instantly invite her to visit and grow used to Earth in his home. She had been bound for some institutional hotel where she would be properly guarded against her unsophistication in Earth customs.
They passed the orbit of Mars.
Now Joe was enormously impatient for the Mavourneen to land. He wanted to show Alice the sky. She had never seen it. He wanted to show her the stars—not from space, but from Earth. He was going to show her the sunset, and the rain, and a sunrise. There would be mountains to be regarded, and the ocean. She must see—and be protected from terror at the sight of—more people than lived on all of Pluto, dining at once in one great room, with many times more moving about outside. She must hear bird songs in the morning. She must—
She grew scared.
“I—want to see the sky,” she said uneasily, “but—what will I look like, Joe, in the sunlight?”
Joe said:
“You’ll look beautiful!”
And he kissed her tenderly.
They’d reached that point above the asteroid belt. The Mavourneen had made a parabolic curve above the plane of the ecliptic to dodge the asteroids, which may be the fragments of that planet which ought to lie between Earth and Mars, but doesn’t. The ship was then curving down again to a rendezvous with Earth. The sun was an angry ball of seething flame, floating in emptiness and spouting streamers of fire. It was already too bright to be looked at directly from the control room ports. Mars could be plainly seen, and Venus was almost as bright as the sun itself appeared from Pluto.
But Joe and Alice did not even think what space looked like, outside the ship. Joe served the meals for the officers and cleared away the dishes and put them in the washer and later stacked them. He did some polishing of cutlery. But then he hastened to find excuses to talk to Alice.
She grew afraid. She had watched vision-tape plays about life on Earth. She had seen pictures. She had read. But by anticipation she felt a shaking agoraphobia. Yet she wanted desperately to see the sky.
Eight hours before landing, she wept bitterly. Joe’s arms were tightly about her, for comfort, but she was terrified. Then she tried to smile at him with wet eyes and her breath still coming in little gasps from past sobbing.
“I—I don’t know what I’d do without you, Joe. You—encourage me so! What would I do without you?”
“You’ll never find out,” he told her. “You’ll never be without me!”
It was quite definitely settled that they were going to marry. After all, Joe had finished college and was trained to a profession, and so was able to support a wife as soon as he got started. Anyhow, his father would help out at the beginning. Obviously Joe couldn’t let Alice try to make her way about Earth alone! So of course they would be married immediately. His father would agree that it was the only sensible arrangement. Nothing else was thinkable!
And so the Mavourneen, huge and swollen of shape and ungraceful to look at and horribly clumsy to handle in atmosphere—so the Mavourneen reached Earth. Joe’s mother and father were at the field when the ship landed. It came down out of nowhere, and Joe’s mother saw it first, but it was instantly blotted out by tears. It grew larger and larger, and its few, unbeautiful exterior features became visible, and then it seemed to sway crushingly overhead. Then it settled down, very heavily and gruntingly, and was on Earth again.
It was not like a passenger-liner landing. Joe’s father and mother were the only people to meet it except those whose livelihood it made. But presently they saw Joe. There was, then, no sign of his having broken an arm. It was long since healed. He came down the landing-ladder with Alice. He helped her to the ground, with the swelling hull of the Mavourneen, above them, blotting out the sky. He hurried her toward his father and mother—but he did not see them. He stopped no more than a dozen feet away from them. Joe’s mother could not speak. His father simply looked.
Joe said exultantly:
“Look, darling! That’s the sky! Look at it! Isn’t it wonderful?”
Joe’s mother and father saw a pretty girl. A young girl. A sweet-faced girl, in every way suitable to rouse their son’s enthusiasm. Joe’s father and mother looked at Joe, and at her. And Alice was frightened and desperately yearning. She did not look at the sky. Her eyes clung affrightedly to Joe’s face, searching his expression. She said in a scared voice:
“H—how do I look—in daylight?”
“Beautiful!” said Joe. It had not occurred to him to have any doubt. There had been no reason for doubt. He kissed her joyously.
His father and mother waited for him to see them. His mother’s eyes overflowed. It was at least partly the result of seeing that Joe had taken another step toward not needing a mother any more. Joe’s father’s face was a little bit gaunt. The last eight months had been pretty bad for him.
They waited while Joe kissed Alice triumphantly, and then faced her about and commanded her to look at the sky and the grass and the trees beyond the field. He showed her a cloud. He showed her the sun.
Presently he noticed his father and mother.
<
* * * *
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Like John Wyndham, Arthur C. Clarke is a British prophet of science fiction who has found his greatest honor in this country. He has published here such fine science-fiction novels asPrelude to Space and Childh
ood’s End, and many shorter stories; his non-fiction books include The Exploration of Space and have reached several hundred thousand book-club members as well as special fans. Clarke, former head of the British Interplanetary Society, is as well qualified as any man to write about the far planets. To prove that he can do as well right here on Earth, see . . .
The Nine Billion Names of God
“This is a slightly unusual request,” said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. “As far as I know, it’s the first time anyone’s been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an Automatic Sequence Computer. I don’t wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly have thought that your —ah—establishment had much use for such a machine. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?”
“Gladly,” replied the lama, readjusting his silk robes and carefully putting away the slide rule he had been using for currency conversions. “Your Mark V Computer can carry out any routine mathematical operation involving up to ten digits. However, for our work we are interested in letters, not numbers. As we wish you to modify the output circuits, the machine will be printing words, not columns of figures.”
“I don’t quite understand. . . .”
“This is a project on which we have been working for the last three centuries—since the lamasery was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your way of thought, so I hope you will listen with an open mind while I explain it.”
“Naturally.”
“It is really quite simple. We have been compiling a list which shall contain all the possible names of God.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“We have reason to believe,” continued the lama imperturbably, “that all such names can be written with not more than nine letters in an alphabet we have devised.”
“And you have been doing this for three centuries?”
“Yes: we expected it would take us about fifteen thousand years to complete the task.”
“Oh,” Dr. Wagner looked a little dazed. “Now I see why you wanted to hire one of our machines. But exactly what is the purpose of this project?”
The lama hesitated for a fraction of a second, and Wagner wondered if he had offended him. If so, there was no trace of annoyance in the reply.
“Call it ritual, if you like, but it’s a fundamental part of our belief. All the many names of the Supreme Being—God, Jehovah, Allah, and so on—they are only man-made labels. There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty here, which I do not propose to discuss, but somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters that can occur are what one may call the real names of God. By systematic permutation of letters, we have been trying to list them all.”
“I see. You’ve been starting at AAAAAAA . . . and working up to ZZZZZZZZ. . . .”
“Exactly—though we use a special alphabet of our own.
Modyifying the electromatic typewriters to deal with this is, of course, trivial. A rather more interesting problem is that of devising suitable circuits to eliminate ridiculous combinations. For example, no letter must occur more than three times in succession.”
“Three? Surely you mean two.”
“Three is correct: I am afraid it would take too long to explain why, even if you understood our language.”
“I’m sure it would,” said Wagner hastily. “Go on.”
“Luckily, it will be a simple matter to adapt your Automatic Sequence Computer for this work, since once it has been programed properly it will permute each letter in turn and print the result. What would have taken us fifteen thousand years it will be able to do in a hundred days.”
Dr. Wagner was scarcely conscious of the faint sounds from the Manhattan streets far below. He was in a different world, a world of natural, not man-made, mountains. High up in their remote aeries these monks had been patiently at work, generation after generation, compiling their lists of meaningless words. Was there any limit to the follies of mankind? Still, he must give no hint of his inner thoughts. The customer was always right. . . .
“There’s no doubt,” replied the doctor, “that we can modify the Mark V to print lists of this nature. I’m much more worried about the problem of installation and maintenance. Getting out to Tibet, in these days, is not going to be easy.”
“We can arrange that. The components are small enough to travel by air—that is one reason why we chose your machine. If you can get them to India, we will provide transport from there.”
“And you want to hire two of our engineers?”
“Yes, for the three months that the project should occupy.”
“I’ve no doubt that Personnel can manage that.” Dr. Wagner scribbled a note on his desk pad. “There are just two other points—”
Before he could finish the sentence the lama had produced a small slip of paper.
“This is my certified credit balance at the Asiatic Bank.”
“Thank you. It appears to be—ah—adequate. The second matter is so trivial that I hesitate to mention it—but it’s surprising how often the obvious gets overlooked. What source of electrical energy have you?”
“A diesel generator providing fifty kilowatts at a hundred and ten volts. It was installed about five years ago and is quite reliable. It’s made life at the lamasery much more comfortable, but of course it was really installed to provide power for the motors driving the prayer wheels.”
“Of course,” echoed Dr. Wagner. “I should have thought of that.”
The view from the parapet was vertiginous, but in time one gets used to anything. After three months, George Hanley was not impressed by the two-thousand-foot swoop into the abyss or the remote checkerboard of fields in the valley below. He was leaning against the wind-smoothed stones and staring morosely at the distant mountains whose names he had never bothered to discover.
This, thought George, was the craziest thing that had ever happened to him. “Project Shangri-La,” some wit back at the labs had christened it. For weeks now the Mark V had been churning out acres of sheets covered with gibberish. Patiently, inexorably, the computer had been rearranging letters in all their possible combinations, exhausting each class before going on to the next. As the sheets had emerged from the electromatic typewriters, the monks had carefully cut them up and pasted them into enormous books. In another week, heaven be praised, they would have finished. Just what obscure calculations had convinced the monks that they needn’t bother to go on to words of ten, twenty, or a hundred letters, George didn’t know. One of his recurring nightmares was that there would be some change of plan, and that the high lama (whom they’d naturally called Sam Jaffe, though he didn’t look a bit like him); would suddenly announce that the project would be extended to approximately a.d. 2060. They were quite capable of it.
George heard the heavy wooden door slam in the wind as Chuck came out onto the parapet beside him. As usual, Chuck was smoking one of the cigars that made him so popular with the monks—who, it seemed, were quite willing to embrace all the minor and most of the major pleasures of life. That was one thing in their favor: they might be crazy, but they weren’t bluenoses. Those frequent trips they took down to the village, for instance . . .
“Listen, George,” said Chuck urgently. “I’ve learned something that means trouble.”
“What’s wrong? Isn’t the machine behaving?” That was the worst contingency George could imagine. It might delay his return, and nothing could be more horrible. The way he felt now, even the sight of a TV commercial would seem like manna from heaven. At least it would be some link with home.
“No—it’s nothing like that.” Chuck settled himself on the parapet, which was unusual because normally he was scared of the drop. “I’ve just found what all this is about.”
“What d’ya mean? I thought we knew.”
“Sure—we know what the monks are trying to do. But we didn’t know why. It’s the craziest thing—”
“Tell me something new,” growled George.
“—but old Sam�
�s just come clean with me. You know the way he drops in every afternoon to watch the sheets roll out. Well, this time he seemed rather excited, or at least as near as he’ll ever get to it. When I told him that we were on the last cycle he asked me, in that cute English accent of his, if I’d ever wondered what they were trying to do. I said, ‘Sure’— and he told me.”
“Go on: I’ll buy it.”
“Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names—and they reckon that there are about nine billion of them—God’s purpose will be achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won’t be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy.”
“Then what do they expect us to do? Commit suicide?”
“There’s no need for that. When the list’s completed, God steps in and simply winds things up . . . bingo!”
Star Science Fiction 1 - [Anthology] Page 23