The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Science Fiction Stories

by Arthur C. Clarke

  It is doubtless but what the entire human race would have vanished, leaving the world to the more competent, though half-ignorant, hands of the beasts, who fought and killed one another for self-preservation and for food—not because of madness…and who did not have books and talk and have culture. The human race would have gone, had it not been for the record.

  The fighters of War’s End, leaving their machines and countries to congregate for personal combat, were engaging in hand-to-hand attacks in the ruins of what once had been a tall and powerful city in the Twentieth Century, but now lay crumbling, its proud buildings falling to the ground, sticking out iron-rusted skeletons to the sky—and the city was Los Angeles!

  * * * *

  Hedrik Hunson was fighting with phosphorized fists—hand inclosed in chemically treated gloves that burned as they struck the antagonist, insulated on the interior for the wearer—when suddenly the two of them were caught by a spreader. The other man died instantly, but Hedrik got it in the side and was whirled about sickeningly, and survived.

  He was lying painfully on something when he came to, but felt too dizzy and sick to move. At last, when his head had cleared a bit, he rolled over into a sitting position and reached out his arms to grasp—a phonograph!

  Big things came in small packages in the days of 2171, and a portable phonograph might well be taken for a weapon of some sort—which was exactly what Hedrik thought! And you can hardly blame him, because no one in that generation had ever seen one of the things.

  There was a curious story connected with the dying of music, concerning the days of 2050 when there was a movement to stamp out all symphonies and songs and things even slightly sentimental.

  —but back to Hedrik!

  Hedrik found the crank that wound the portable, turned it, reasoning that perhaps it gave power—and then—holding it away from him—he waited for rays to spurt out or something to explode.

  Nothing happened.

  Hedrik was disappointed. After an agony of perspiration and puzzlement, he finally accidentally placed the needled arm onto the disk. The disk, he noticed, was black and filled with little undulations. The disk was like a wheel—so Hedrik thought, It should revolve like one, shouldn’t it? He pushed the starter thoughtfully and was more than surprised when the disk started spinning.

  From the phonograph came music—music and singing! The lost Art had returned! The Art banished under compulsion had made a comeback.

  Some man was singing on the record—in a queerly interesting and familiar tongue, the ancient English. The singer seemed sad, almost crying. And Hedrik was thrilled as he played it over and over again, drinking in the new experience like wine on the lips of a connoisseur. The voice rose, fell, lingered. And Hedrik suddenly didn’t feel like fighting anymore!

  The music floated out over the tumbled ruins, descended to the ears of the other people. And the fighting ceased! They were transformed. They came running to crowd about the machine.

  And there in that aged music shop they stood enthralled—music filled their souls. It was exactly what they had needed and wanted for many years. And it had been denied them. Music was the balancing force…the force that would help them struggle ahead rebuilding the world. And next time they would be saner…they knew…the lesson of luxury had been learned and learned well. Never again would they leave all of the work to the machines. Now they would work and sing and play.

  It would be work…hard work…for some time to come. But they had found music again, and that would anchor them to sanity.

  And thus was mankind saved through a record—Sonny Boy!

  THE NEW REALITY, by Reginald Bretnor

  Not one member of the President’s Crisis Commission returned Driscoll’s smile. Instead, they ignored him completely. That pleased him, for he had only smiled because all six of them were his enemies, and because he knew all the world was watching. He did not try to join them. He drew his chair out from the wall to about ten feet from the end of their long, polished table, where he could watch their faces and they could not help seeing his. He sat down, briefcase on the floor beside him and a copy of his own bestseller, the book they hated, on his lap: The New Reality, by A. Craddock Driscoll, Ph.D.

  They could ignore him, just as they had ignored his theories and his carefully woven proofs ever since the book that proved them wrong was published. They could make sure that his viewpoint was not represented on the Commission. They had enough power for that, just as they had had the power to have him railroaded out of his Columbia professorship. But they could not keep the media from backing him, and the public who were his readers. Nor, he knew, could they stop him from bringing down their whole house of cards after they had finished. They would be unprepared, and the whole world was watching.

  Driscoll was a spare, almost cadaverous man, just into middle age, just under middle height. He carried himself like a soldier, and he sat bolt-upright in his chair—very much, he thought, as a Civil War general might have sat his horse. He had a good profile, a strong profile, and he sat so that the watchers would not miss it, his eyes scanning the members of the panel, but pausing each time to concentrate on the Chairwoman, Madeleine Krenn-Jakob. They had been undergraduates together; they had been in graduate school at the same time; and from the very beginning, he had known that she—so slow, so painfully methodical—had envied him his brilliance, And of course the remarks he’d made about her had drifted back to her—that she was the finest third-rate mind in school, that sort of thing, remarks so barbed that they had always started his own friends snickering at the sight of her. She had pretended to ignore them, just as she was now ignoring him, but he had known better.

  As a young woman, Madeleine Krenn had been attractive—not a beauty, but very fresh, a little plump, looking always deceptively vulnerable. She hadn’t been. His own one or two ritual attempts at passes had been brushed off with polite contempt.

  No, she had not been stupid. His own grade-point average and hers had been almost equal. Each had done well, she with her pedestrian plodding, he with his flashes of true genius. Each had gone directly from grad school to the faculty. The only trouble had been that she was always wrong. She had been wrong when they had published her crazy dissertation, Ominous Aspects of the Socio-psychological Influence of Audio-Visual Media, more than twenty years ago, when holograms were little more than laboratory curiosities. And she had been persistently wrong ever since. The difference was that now she was riding high, with both the academic and political worlds agreeing with her, and he—except for the media and the masses of the general public—was being dismissed as a crackpot.

  He smiled to himself. It was hard to make a convincing crackpot out of a scholar whose latest book was a national bestseller, and who had become as well known to the holo public as Carl Sagan had to the video audiences of an earlier day.

  There she sat, Chairwoman of the President’s Crisis Commission. Quietly tailored, without makeup, without jewelry, she was heavier now, her dark hair greying perceptibly, and she looked sad and tired.

  He could read her nervousness, her anxiety, in the tension of her neck muscles. She should be, he thought, with me sitting here. She would be no more able to stop him from delivering his unanswerable argument than she had been able to stop him from attending.

  She was speaking, her voice soft and very weary. “You all know why we are here. We have reached a critical point in our history, in mankind’s. We have recognized for a long time that we were approaching one, but we could neither agree on its nature nor decide what steps should be taken to contend with it. That is why the President, in this country, and the Prime Minister in England, and various other heads of state, each appointed a Crisis Commission a year ago. We exchanged data, and we have reached a unanimous decision. But before I announce it, if the others on the Commission do not mind, I’d like to outline the background for you once again so that there will be no misunderstanding.”

  She looked to left, to right, at Moylan and Greens
pan of Harvard, Avolantis of U.C., Garfield of Loyola, Cheng of Stanford, men and women whom her faction considered the country’s most eminent socio-psychologists. They nodded, looking as anxious and as tired as she.

  “Very well, then. As you have all heard, the crisis we face is a simple and terrible one: sudden and almost universal insanity. Such things have happened on a much smaller scale more than once in man’s history, when groups large and small have abruptly, and for no known reason, lost touch with reality. The Children’s Crusade during the Middle Ages was such an occurrence. So was the terrible wave of witch-burnings, especially in Germany, some centuries later. So was the mass suicide of hundreds of Americans in Guyana almost in our own times.

  “After much study, we have decided that in each instance the proximate cause was an event involving what Jung called the group subconscious, a realm of being we all share to some degree, and which we still cannot understand. That is the level, we now believe, where telepathic phenomena occur, especially those involving raw emotion—and whenever we find that disassociation from reality which defines psychosis, we always find raw emotion, frightening and powerful. Here we have the most probable explanation for what used to be called mass hysteria, mass hallucination, the madness of crowds.”

  What utter bullshit! Driscoll thought—but he said nothing. It was not yet time.

  “Now,” she continued, “let us go back to the early years of this century, when radio was the main medium of popular entertainment. Among the most addictive programs were what were called soap operas, crude tear-jerkers with devoted followings. Everyone was amused because whenever one of their characters was married, truckloads of gifts would arrive from listeners literally unable to distinguish the radio play from reality. Then later, when TV appeared, a new phenomenon occurred: viewers accustomed to excessive violence in their entertainment paid no attention when it happened in real life. Time after time, they’d watch the commission of a rape or murder and not even call the police The term ‘spectator crimes’ was coined to describe this.

  “Meanwhile, the behavior patterns shown on the media, the morals and ethics or the lack of them, or their distortion, were having their effect. It is no coincidence that, as the surrogate realities of TV became more violent and less restrained in all human relations, crime and every other form of anti-social, anti-personal behavior went, up correspondingly. The hardness of reality was being diluted; the meaning of reality was being twisted. The ingredients for individual psychoses were already brewing, and with them, because of the emotional stress and turmoil involved, the ingredients for new mass psychoses.”

  Pausing, she pointed at a video screen above their heads. “The ingredients in our witches’ cauldron have been simmering and bubbling and getting hotter and hotter as we’ve added to them. I’m going to let Dr. Cheng show you what our computers have told us about what’s happened—”

  Four dotted lines appeared one above the other in the screen’s lower left corner: yellow, green, blue, and red.

  “This display covers the pre-holo period only. You’ll observe that, with an occasional minor dip, they all rise at increasing rates. The yellow line represents teenage and pre-teen self-destruction: drugs, psychotic violence, suicide. The green line shows the adult equivalent; the blue measures violent crime at all ages; the red diagrams the incidence of mass psychosis. You will observe that, towards the end, the red line starts to climb much faster than the others. Why did this happen? The answer’s simple. The TV habit—and it was a habit, for the average set was on six or seven hours a day—not only weaned a great many people away from the real world, but the tube became their reality.” She smiled bitterly. “But contrary to mass-media propaganda, this new reality—”

  Driscoll’s mouth twisted. Had she looked at him just as she said that?

  “—this new reality was not a healthy one. Remember, too, that this was TV alone, before holo. Dr. Cheng, will you show us the comparison?”

  Cheng touched the unobtrusive console in front of him and four new lines appeared, solid lines.

  “Now you will see the effect of our twelve years of mass holo use. For twelve years, you have been watching men, women, and children suffering, bleeding, dying, outraging each other physically in a hundred different ways, all in your own family or living rooms, all virtually indistinguishable from the real and solid. You have seen their throats cut; you have leered at their orgasms; you have shared the fantastic thrills of risked lives at no peril to your own. Now watch!

  “See how sharply each line soars past those older ones? Do you know what the red line shows us now? It shows us episodes like the one on that eight-hundred-passenger superjet, where suddenly, at thirty thousand feet, the passengers became a mob, a rabid mob, and tore the crew to pieces before the plane finished its last dreadful dive into the Andes.”

  Driscoll shook his head. Again he smiled, turning to make sure that every watcher saw him do it. His own book had refuted every one of her contentions. His chapter on “The New Dimensions of Reality” had shown definitely that the social phenomena she blamed on holo were cyclic, that indeed had it not been for holo and the new dimensions it opened to the mind things would have been infinitely worse.

  He reviewed his other chapters: “Children in the New Reality,” “Holo and the Healthy Mind,” “The Empty Jungian Myth,” and all the rest. She was persuasive—he had to give her that. She had persuaded her fellow academics, all but a few politicians, and now even more and more of the media men. She was the cause and root of all of it. Had it not been for her—

  Well, her day was over. His turn had almost come.

  Madeleine Krenn-Jakob gestured to Cheng to wipe the screen, and the lines vanished “What you have seen has been our measurement of the cauldron’s simmering, the cauldron that’s the mass subconscious of mankind. Now look at what our computer extrapolations tell us. Not about the remote future, no! About the next few weeks, or days, or hours!”

  A red line, jagged, sprang viciously to life. For a few inches, it angled upward—and then, abruptly, straightened and slashed its way straight up.

  “Look!” she said. “It’s a curve no longer. It has already reached asymptote. That means that we can count on no time at all until everything boils over!” She stopped, regarding her unseen watchers levelly.

  “And that,” she told them, “is why the Commission has already rendered its unanimous report to the President of the United States. That is why, as you may have noticed, all National Guard and Reserve units have been called to active duty, and all police reserve placed on instant alert. Even now, the President is issuing the necessary orders. There is only one thing we can do, and he is doing it. There will be no more holo transmissions. All holo installations will be shut down. And for the time being at least, television—or what’s left of it—will be restricted to news and commentary.”

  Cheng cleared the screen. She stood.

  “That is all,” she said.

  “The hell it is!” growled Driscoll, no longer smiling. He too stood up, letting his book fall to the floor, his right hand in his open briefcase.

  Neither she nor the other members of the panel paid him any heed.

  “This idiocy has gone far enough!” Driscoll’s voice was loud and strident now. “Well, I have one argument you cannot counter, one that is going to stop this here and now!”

  He saw that one of the Commission members—was it Garfield?—was making some sort of an announcement and that Madeleine Krenn-Jakob was listening closely.

  “Damn you!” he shouted at her. “Damn you, look at me!” He let the briefcase drop so all could see the .45 automatic in his hand.

  She paid him no attention. Nobody turned. Garfield, unbelievably, kept on with his announcement.

  Coolly, he shot her through the head, and triumphantly he watched for her to fall.

  She didn’t. She seemed to be thanking Garfield for whatever it was that he had said.

  Driscoll stared at her, at all of them. He coul
d feel every nerve screaming, every muscle straining against itself. Yet he couldn’t have missed, not at that range, never. Or could he? Twice more he shot her, aiming for her body.

  Then, desperately, he emptied, the gun at Cheng, at Garfield, at the others.

  And nothing happened.

  Driscoll threw the empty pistol at them, cursing, screaming at them. “Damn you! Damn you! Die! Why can’t you die?” Then he collapsed onto his chair, sobbing hideously, clawing at his face and forehead with his fingers.

  Of course he could have turned them off at any time, but he had forgotten that.

  WHAT HATH ME? by Henry Kuttner

  The man running through the forest gloom breathed in hot, panting gusts, pain tearing at his chest. Underfoot the crawling, pale network of tree-trunks lay flat upon the ground, and more than once he tripped over a slippery bole and crashed down, but he was up again instantly.

  He had no breath to scream. He sobbed as he ran, his burning eyes trying to pierce the shadows. Whispers rustled down from above. When the leaf-ceiling parted, a blaze of terribly bright stars flamed in the jet sky. It was cold and dark, and the man knew that he was not on Earth.

  They were following him, even here.

  A squat yellow figure, huge-eyed, inhuman, loomed in his path—one of the swamp people of Southern Venus. The man swung a wild blow at the thing, and his fist found nothing. It had vanished. But beyond it rose a single-legged giant, a Martian, bellowing the great, gusty laughter of the Redland tribes.

  The man dodged, stumbled, and smashed down heavily. He heard padding footsteps and tried, with horrible intensity of purpose, to rise. He could not.

  The Martian crept toward him—but it was no longer a Martian. An Earthman, with the face of some obscene devil, came forward with a slow, sidling motion. Horns sprouted from the low forehead. The teeth were fangs. As the creature came nearer, it raised its hands—twisted, gnarled talons—and slid them about the man’s throat.