The Year's Best Science Fiction 10 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  Although he must have hinted at this in some way before Orion came in, there was a murmur of dissent which the President stilled by holding up his hand.

  “It’s all been decided, gentlemen. I have drawn up the necessary papers—which I now sign.” He scratched his name quickly several times. “They require only the signatures of some of you to make them official and binding. Then in your presence, Mr. Newcastle will be sworn by the Chief Justice as the next President of the United States.”

  “But why, sir?” the Secretary of State asked. “What possible reason can you have?”

  “One of the very best,” the President said with a wry smile. “The reason is simply that I have learned, gentlemen, on the highest authority, that I have only a few more hours to live.”

  And within the quarter-hour the shocked assemblage had signed their names and watched Orion Newcastle, whom two or three of them considered to be nothing more than an aging buffoon, be sworn in as President of the United States.

  * * * *

  When you hear the tone, it will be exactly 7:10 p.m., Eastern Standard Time.

  Andrew Grey wasn’t the only newsman trying to write the impossible story, of course. Fully 15 others in the huge newsroom were assigned to various angles. But his was to be the main story, the one which would appear in the right-hand column of page one under the eight-column, three-bank headline.

  The final editions of the evening papers had already had a bash at it. To them it was a straightforward, if hopeless, story to be told. Perhaps the Post told it more simply than its rivals, with the one-word headline: “DOOMSDAY.”

  Actually it was the penultimate day, the day before doom. This was what the President had been leading up to when he said shortly after four p.m. that he had only a few more hours to live. What he meant, and what he said a few minutes later, was that everybody was going to die. The end was due at midnight, Eastern Standard Time (nine p.m. Pacific Standard Time, five a.m. the next day London time, six a.m. Paris time, seven a.m. Mecca time, eight a.m. Moscow time) and so on around the poor doomed world.

  The President had known for some weeks that the end was approaching. So had the State Department and, abroad, 10 Downing Street, the Quai D’Orsay, the Vatican and the Kremlin. Computers in all the capitals had been working at top speed, 24 hours a day, looking for a flaw, a way out, anything. The computers—Communist, neutral and Western—agreed there was no way out. There was nothing Earth could do to save itself.

  Had it been a meteor, this extraterrestrial menace, something might have been done. Even a good-sized asteroid, having strayed out of orbit and into a collision course with Earth, could have been broken up into relatively small, harmless chunks that would burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere if the world powers cooperated in firing their space-age weapons at it.

  But there was no way known of dispelling a cloud of noxious gas so huge it would envelop the Earth for 37 days, poisoning every breathing thing.

  The evening papers put out their final editions and their staffs went home to their loved ones, went out to get drunk, went to holy places to pray. The Journal-American said:

  WORLD ENDING

  President, Pope,

  Kremlin

  Confirm Holocaust

  NO WAY OUT FOR EARTH

  Moon Flight Couple Also Doomed

  The World-Telegram revealed the reasons behind the President’s resignation in favor of Orion Newcastle—the fact that during World War II, when both were unknown noncoms, the older man, though wounded, had dragged the younger one inch by inch through a minefield to an aid station and to the treatment there which had saved his life; and the fact that Newcastle had never again mentioned that incident, publicly or privately, in all the years since the war. A man of such courage and unselfishness, who, moreover, had been elected by the people to the second-highest office in the land, surely was entitled to be President, if at all possible, during the last several hours of his and the world’s existence—even if he was an incompetent buffoon.

  The World-Telegram also found room for half a dozen human-interest stories. There was the one about the bank president who had been told confidentially by his friend the Secretary of the Treasury about the imminent end, and who had amused himself by taking a teller’s place and giving away vast sums of money, including a quarter million or so to a bank robber who had threatened to blow up the place with nitroglycerine but who obviously was an amateur with a little jar of water. There were the stories of the publisher who had given the beatnik poet a $15,000 advance on an impossible sheaf of nonverses, and of the partner in Tiffany’s who, pretending to be a clerk, had sold a little boy a seven-thousand-dollar necklace for a dollar fourteen.

  Only an elite few had known the truth before the President’s announcement but the truth had trickled down among the influential, moneyed group, enabling many who had never before considered playing the role to become philanthropists in various ways, either for the honest fun of it, or because of the good will this presumably would lay up for them in the next world, if any.

  Oh, about that moon flight couple. They were a cosmonaut and a cosmonette, so-called, Russian. They were doomed like the rest of humanity, Tass explained unhappily, because the killer cloud would envelop the moon as well as the Earth and the space between them.

  Let’s get back to our man on the Times, Andy Grey, struggling with syntax in his attempt to write today’s story from tomorrow’s mythical (because nonexistent) point of view. To put it another way, he was trying to manipulate the language so his story would look back as honestly as possible, from a day that wouldn’t exist, on the events of Earth’s last day.

  Yet his story could not be 100% positive.

  The first edition appeared at ten p.m. and there was always the possibility, however slight, that something might happen between press time and midnight to change everything. Theoretically it was an impossible story to write. Actually, though, it could be done if it were sufficiently hedged, with enough loopholes left.

  Andy Grey rolled another sheet of copy paper into his typewriter, lit another cigarette (at least lung cancer would never touch him now) and tried again to write a lead that would, as they say, “stand up” through all editions, both those that came out tonight and those printed, or due to be printed, tomorrow.

  The world came to an end yesterday. Of course you couldn’t say that. If it had, there’d be no one left to write such a sentence.

  The Earth was due to be destroyed last night, the top international scientists agreed. Said when? Last night, presumably. But the concept of “last night” cannot exist unless there is a “today” to look back from. Thus, if the world had ended last night, there could be no today and the sentence, designed to be read by today-people, was nonsense.

  There will be no today, despite the date on this newspaper. Never in The New York Times—too whimsical!

  It could have been done entirely with out-of-town datelines like Washington, London and Moscow—there were plenty of such stories already in type under “yesterday’s” date—but the publisher and president of the paper had decided that the overall lead had to be an undated one, so-called, written from the point of view of the date of the newspaper: “today,” meaning tomorrow.

  Andy Grey crumpled up his umpteenth piece of copy paper and lit his next cigarette, reflecting that the problems posed by European Press in bygone days were pikers compared to his present dilemma.

  A copy boy brought Andy the first editions of “tomorrow’s” tabloid, the Daily News, which came out two hours earlier than the Times.

  “END NIGH,” the Daily News said in its biggest, thickest headline type. Before pursuing this to p. 3, where the story was, Grey turned to the center fold minus one, to see what the editorial said. Typically colloquial, it was headed “SO LONG, EVERYBODY,” and went on:

  We hear we’re wasting our time writing this editorial for a paper that won’t hit the stands today (which is really tomorrow to us—that is, the man writing this), but t
here’s an old show-business adage which, adapted to our business, applies here: the paper must come out if it’s at all possible.

  We naturally greet the news of our impending doom, and yours, as so dramatically described by our Washington man on page 3, with mixed emotions . . .

  Grey envied the News its easy, colloquial approach to doomsday. Inside was a sidebar under these encouraging words: “RELIGIOUS LEADERS PLEDGE HEREAFTER.”

  None of this was of any help to Grey. He was well into his fourth pack when the boy came up with the Herald Tribune, which had obviously advanced its publication time. The Trib, which had been livelying itself up these many years, much to the Times’ annoyance, had put all its columnists on the front page, as if to assuage the grief of its readership by showing them that Walter Lippmann, John Crosby, David Lawrence, Judith Crist and Art Buchwald were going, too. Each had something wise, funny, wry or profound to say about the putative end of the world. Donald I. Rogers, the financial editor, was not on the front page but his comment was summarized there, in the Topic A column. He said, in part, “If these words are read today, I predict the biggest, best, bull-est day Wall Street has ever had!!!” (Exclamation points his.)

  The Trib’s headline, all-encompassing in its simplicity, said: “NO TOMORROW?”

  That question mark, after the word which so magnificently ignored the petty journalistic fetish of yesterday-today-tomorrow by transmuting itself into its metaphorical sense—meaning, loosely, the future—was the despair of every other newspaper editor in New York and, eventually, the world.

  Because, of course, the world did not end.

  There had been a mistake by the computers, which had been operating on old data, fed to them by old programmers, who had got their stuff from old scientists.

  Had it been 1900 when the noxious cloud touched Earth, or even 1930, mankind, not to speak of animalkind, bird-kind, fishkind and insectkind, would have perished instanter. But, in the years between, Earthmen had contaminated their atmosphere with radiation, automobile exhaust, DDT and other anti-insect sprays, smokestack exhaust, cigarette, cigar and pipe smoke, autumn weed smoke from the proliferating suburbs and multifarious miscellaneous contaminants. It was this unwholesome combination, called by some the “Rachel Carson effect,” which saved Earth.

  The whole shemozzle, as Buchwald later called it, was far more poisonous than the petty little toxic-cloud menace alleged to have been threatening the planet.

  What had happened was that humanity, little by little over the decades, had built up immunities to the various poisons it was forced to live with and ingest. The cumulative immunity was a fantastically powerful one which it would have taken a real hoopdinger of a menace, as Earl Wilson was to put it, to outdo.

  Thus Earth lived—as recorded in an Associated Press flash sent (by who knows what group of dedicated newsmen) at 12:01 a.m. EST. It said, simply, “FLASH—EARTH LIVES,” and there were an awful lot of bells ringing on the teletype machines. UPI was only about half a minute behind with its own realization that another day had begun.

  Consternation reigned, of course. There was a bull market, as the Trib’s Don Rogers predicted.

  There was also a lot of panic in high places as the bosses who had given it away went crazy trying to get it back. And an awful lot of people, from President Orion Newcastle to little Billy Boyce, weren’t giving up a thing.

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  * * * *

  Certain qualities are essential to the good newsman: a capacity for accurate and detailed research; a feeling for the “human angle”; and just that touch of precognition (all right, call it hunch—or even extrapolation) that tells him where to turn for the next story.

  Arthur Clarke, somehow, has never been a newsman: physicist, mathematician, astronomer, inventor, skin-diver, treasure-hunter, lecturer and teacher, he has been editor, author, journalist, encyclopaedist, and (most recently) scenarist. (By the time you read this, the two-way Clarke-(Strangelove) Kubrick collaboration, 2001: A Space Odyssey, should be in print in book form, and ready for release on film.)

  Clarke is a curiously free man. There is a detachment about him which seems less a traditional “British reserve” than a sort of disassociation from the gravity-ridden surface world—as if his true home were in free-fall space, or perhaps in free-floating oceanic deeps. He approaches his multiple interests with a sort of visitor-on-Earth enthusiasm: I have seen him display, with equal delight, gold coins from a treasure-hunt diving trip; a new press release on the Kubrick collaboration; a hotel-window view of New York’s skyline through his new Questar telescope; and the plastic-label-maker with which he was turning out stick-ups for his one-man campaign: HELP STAMP OUT POP ART!

  He is, generally, a vigorous man with an opinion. In an article in Playboy last year, “The Meddlers,” he wrote: “A certain amount of meddling is an excellent thing. It laid the foundations of experimental science and modern technology. But the intelligent meddler must abide by a few commonsense rules, of which the most important are: (1) Do not attempt the unforseeable; (2) do not commit the irrevocable.”

  “Intelligent meddler” is probably as good a description of “experimental scientist” as any other. And certain qualities are necessary for the job: a capacity for detailed research; a faculty for accurate extrapolation (or hunch, or precognition); and (for intelligent meddling) a recognition of the human values involved.

  In a survey conducted by the fan magazine Double Bill, Clarke gave as his reason for writing science fiction: “Because most other literature isn’t concerned with reality.”

  And of course it is also true that certain qualities are essential to the good science-fiction writer; the ability to project future hunches (or precognitions, or extrapolations) must rest on a capacity for detailed, accurate research; and it cannot be good fiction of any sort unless the author has a deep awareness of the human (or other) elements involved.

  * * * *

  THE SHINING ONES

  Arthur C. Clarke

  When the switchboard said that the Soviet Embassy was on the line, my first reaction was: “Good—another job!” But the moment I heard Goncharov’s voice, I knew there was trouble.

  “Klaus? This is Mikhail. Can you come over at once? It’s very urgent, and I can’t talk on the phone.”

  I worried all through the 20-minute drive to Geneva, marshaling my defenses in case anything had gone wrong at our end. But I could think of nothing; at the moment, we had no outstanding contracts with the Russians. The last job had been completed six months before, on time, and to their entire satisfaction.

  Well, they were not satisfied with it now, as I discovered quickly enough. Mikhail Goncharov, the commercial attaché, was an old friend of mine; he told me all he knew, but it was not very much.

  “We’ve just had an urgent cable from Ceylon,” he said.

  “They want you out there immediately. There’s serious trouble at the hydrothermal project.”

  “What sort of trouble?” I asked. I knew at once, of course, that it would be the deep end, for that was the only part of the installation that had concerned us. The Russians themselves had done all the work on land—but they had had to call on us to fix those grids, 3,000 feet down in the Indian Ocean. There is no other firm in the world that can live up to our motto: “any job, any depth.”

  “All I know,” said Goncharov, “is that the site engineers report a complete breakdown, that the Prime Minister of Ceylon is opening the plant three weeks from now and that Moscow will be very, very unhappy if it’s not working then.”

  My mind went rapidly through the penalty clauses in our contract. The firm seemed to be covered, because the client had signed the take-over certificate, thereby admitting that the job was up to specification. However, it was not as simple as that; if negligence on our part were proved, we might be safe from legal action, but it would be very bad for business. And it would be even worse for me, personally; for I had been project supervisor in Trinco Deep.


  Don’t call me a diver, please; I hate the name. I’m a deep-sea engineer, and I use diving gear about as often as an airman uses a parachute. Most of my work is done with TV and remote-controlled robots; when I do have to go down myself, I’m inside a minisub with external manipulators. We call it a lobster because of its claws; the standard model works down to 5,000 feet, but there are special versions that will operate at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. I’ve never been there myself, but will be glad to quote terms if you’re interested. At a rough estimate, it will cost you a dollar a foot plus a thousand an hour on the job itself.

  I realized that the Russians meant business when Goncharov said that a jet was waiting at Zurich, and could I be at the airport within two hours?

  “Look,” I said. “I can’t do a thing without equipment— and the gear needed even for an inspection weighs tons. Besides, it’s all at Spezia.”

  “I know,” Mikhail answered implacably. “We’ll have another jet transport there. Cable from Ceylon as soon as you know what you want: it will be on the site within twelve hours. But please don’t talk to anyone about this; we prefer to keep our problems to ourselves.”