There was, of course, one factor that disposed of the ridiculous story at once. It was really very simple; he felt sorry he hadn’t thought of it before. What would such a creature live on? There was not even a trace of vegetation on the whole of the planet. He laughed to think that the bogy could be disposed of so easily – and in the same instant felt annoyed with himself for not laughing aloud. If he was so sure of his reasoning, why not whistle, or sing, or do anything to keep up his spirits? He put the question fairly to himself as a test of his manhood. Half-ashamed, he had to admit that he was still afraid – afraid because ‘there might be something in it, after all.’ But at least his analysis had done him some good.
It would have been better if he had left it there, and remained half-convinced by his argument. But a part of his mind was still busily trying to break down his careful reasoning. It succeeded only too well, and when he remembered the plant-beings of Xantil Major the shock was so unpleasant that he stopped dead in his tracks.
Now the plant-beings of Xantil were not in any way horrible. They were in fact extremely beautiful creatures. But what made them appear so distressing now was the knowledge that they could live for indefinite periods with no food whatsoever. All the energy they needed for their strange lives they extracted from cosmic radiation – and that was almost as intense here as anywhere else in the universe.
He had scarcely thought of one example before others crowded into his mind and he remembered the life form on Trantor Beta, which was the only one known capable of directly utilising atomic energy. That too had lived on an utterly barren world, very much like this …
Armstrong’s mind was rapidly splitting into two distinct portions, each trying to convince the other and neither wholly succeeding. He did not realise how far his morale had gone until he found himself holding his breath lest it conceal any sound from the darkness about him. Angrily, he cleared his mind of the rubbish that had been gathering there and turned once more to the immediate problem.
There was no doubt that the road was slowly rising, and the silhouette of the horizon seemed much higher in the sky. The road began to twist, and suddenly he was aware of great rocks on either side of him. Soon only a narrow ribbon of sky was still visible, and the darkness became, if possible, even more intense.
Somehow, he felt safer with the rock walls surrounding him: it meant that he was protected except in two directions. Also, the road had been levelled more carefully and it was easy to keep it. Best of all, he knew now that the journey was more than half completed.
For a moment his spirits began to rise. Then, with maddening perversity, his mind went back into the old grooves again. He remembered that it was on the far side of Carver’s Pass that the old clerk’s adventure had taken place – if it had ever happened at all.
In half a mile, he would be out in the open again, out of the protection of these sheltering rocks. The thought seemed doubly horrible now and he already felt a sense of nakedness. He could be attacked from any direction, and he would be utterly helpless …
Until now, he had still retained some self-control. Very resolutely he had kept his mind away from the one fact that gave some colour to the old man’s tale – the single piece of evidence that had stopped the banter in the crowded room back at the camp and brought a sudden hush upon the company. Now, as Armstrong’s will weakened, he recalled again the words that had struck a momentary chill even in the warm comfort of the base building.
The little clerk had been very insistent on one point. He had never heard any sound of pursuit from the dim shape sensed, rather than seen, at the limit of his light. There was no scuffling of claws or hoofs on rock, nor even the clatter of displaced stones. It was as if, so the old man had declared in that solemn manner of his, ‘as if the thing that was following could see perfectly in the darkness, and had many small legs or pads so that it could move swiftly and easily over the rock – like a giant caterpillar or one of the carpet-things of Kralkor II.’
Yet, although there had been no noise of pursuit, there had been one sound that the old man had caught several times. It was so unusual that its very strangeness made it doubly ominous. It was a faint but horribly persistent clicking.
The old fellow had been able to describe it very vividly – much too vividly for Armstrong’s liking now.
‘Have you ever listened to a large insect crunching its prey?’ he said. ‘Well, it was just like that. I imagine that a crab makes exactly the same noise with its claws when it clashes them together. It was a – what’s the word? – a chitinous sound.’
At this point, Armstrong remembered laughing loudly. (Strange, how it was all coming back to him now.) But no one else had laughed, though they had been quick to do so earlier. Sensing the change of tone, he had sobered at once and asked the old man to continue his story. How he wished now that he had stifled his curiosity!
It had been quickly told. The next day, a party of sceptical technicians had gone into the no-man’s land beyond Carver’s Pass. They were not sceptical enough to leave their guns behind, but they had no cause to use them for they found no trace of any living thing. There were the inevitable pits and tunnels, glistening holes down which the light of the torches rebounded endlessly until it was lost in the distance – but the planet was riddled with them.
Though the party found no sign of life, it discovered one thing it did not like at all. Out in the barren and unexplored land beyond the Pass they had come upon an even larger tunnel than the rest. Near the mouth of that tunnel was a massive rock, half embedded in the ground. And the sides of that rock had been worn away as if it had been used as an enormous whetstone.
No less than five of those present had seen this disturbing rock. None of them could explain it satisfactorily as a natural formation, but they still refused to accept the old man’s story. Armstrong had asked them if they had ever put it to the test. There had been an uncomfortable silence. Then big Andrew Hargraves had said: ‘Hell, who’d walk out to the Pass at night just for fun!’ and had left it at that. Indeed, there was no other record of anyone walking from Port Sanderson to the camp by night, or for that matter by day. During the hours of light, no unprotected human being could live in the open beneath the rays of the enormous, lurid sun that seemed to fill half the sky. And no one would walk six miles, wearing radiation armour, if the tractor was available.
Armstrong felt that he was leaving the Pass. The rocks on either side were falling away, and the road was no longer as firm and well packed as it had been. He was coming out into the open plain once more, and somewhere not far away in the darkness was that enigmatic pillar that might have been used for sharpening monstrous fangs or claws. It was not a reassuring thought, but he could not get it out of his mind.
Feeling distinctly worried now, Armstrong made a great effort to pull himself together. He would try to be rational again; he would think of business, the work he had done at the camp – anything but this infernal place. For a while, he succeeded quite well. But presently, with a maddening persistence, every train of thought came back to the same point. He could not get out of his mind the picture of that inexplicable rock and its appalling possibilities. Over and over again he found himself wondering how far away it was, whether he had already passed it, and whether it was on his right or his left….
The ground was quite flat again, and the road drove on straight as an arrow. There was one gleam of consolation: Port Sanderson could not be much more than two miles away. Armstrong had no idea how long he had been on the road. Unfortunately his watch was not illuminated and he could only guess at the passage of time. With any luck, the ‘Canopus’ should not take off for another two hours at least. But he could not be sure, and now another fear began to enter his mind – the dread that he might see a vast constellation of lights rising swiftly into the sky ahead, and know that all this agony of mind had been in vain.
He was not zigzagging so badly now, and seemed to be able to anticipate the edge of the road before stumbling off it
. It was probable, he cheered himself by thinking, that he was travelling almost as fast as if he had a light. If all went well, he might be nearing Port Sanderson in thirty minutes – a ridiculously small space of time. How he would laugh at his fears when he strolled into his already reserved stateroom in the ‘Canopus’, and felt that peculiar quiver as the phantom drive hurled the great ship far out of this system, back to the clustered starclouds near the centre of the Galaxy – back toward Earth itself, which he had not seen for so many years. One day, he told himself, he really must visit Earth again. All his life he had been making the promise, but always there had been the same answer – lack of time. Strange, wasn’t it, that such a tiny planet should have played so enormous a part in the development of the Universe, should even have come to dominate worlds far wiser and more intelligent than itself!
Armstrong’s thoughts were harmless again, and he felt calmer. The knowledge that he was nearing Port Sanderon was immensely reassuring, and he deliberately kept his mind on familiar, unimportant matters. Carver’s Pass was already far behind, and with it that thing he no longer intended to recall. One day, if he ever returned to this world, he would visit the pass in the daytime and laugh at his fears. In twenty minutes now, they would have joined the nightmares of his childhood.
It was almost a shock, though one of the most pleasant he had ever known, when he saw the lights of Port Sanderson come up over the horizon. The curvature of this little world was very deceptive: it did not seem right that a planet with a gravity almost as great as Earth’s should have a horizon so close at hand. One day, someone would have to discover what lay at this world’s core to give it so great a density. Perhaps the many tunnels would help – it was an unfortunate turn of thought, but the nearness of his goal had robbed it of terror now. Indeed, the thought that he might really be in danger seemed to give his adventure a certain piquancy and heightened interest. Nothing could happen to him now, with ten minutes to go and the lights of the Port already in sight.
A few minutes later, his feelings changed abruptly when he came to the sudden bend in the road. He had forgotten the chasm that caused his detour, and added half a mile to the journey. Well, what of it? he thought stubbornly. An extra half-mile would make no difference now – another ten minutes, at the most.
It was very disappointing when the lights of the city vanished. Armstrong had not remembered the hill which the road was skirting; perhaps it was only a low ridge, scarcely noticeable in the daytime. But by hiding the lights of the port it had taken away his chief talisman and left him again at the mercy of his fears.
Very unreasonably, his intelligence told him, he began to think how horrible it would be if anything happened now, so near the end of the journey. He kept the worst of his fears at bay for a while, hoping desperately that the lights of the city would soon reappear. But as the minutes dragged on, he realised that the ridge must be longer than he imagined. He tried to cheer himself by the thought that the city would be all the nearer when he saw it again, but somehow logic seemed to have failed him now. For presently he found himself doing something he had not stooped to, even out in the waste by Carver’s Pass.
He stopped, turned slowly round, and with bated breath listened until his lungs were nearly bursting.
The silence was uncanny, considering how near he must be to the Port. There was certainly no sound from behind him. Of course there wouldn’t be, he told himself angrily. But he was immensely relieved. The thought of that faint and insistent clicking had been haunting him for the last hour.
So friendly and familiar was the noise that did reach him at last that the anticlimax almost made him laugh aloud. Drifting through the still air from a source clearly not more than a mile away came the sound of a landing-field tractor, perhaps one of the machines loading the ‘Canopus’ itself. In a matter of seconds, thought Armstrong, he would be around this ridge with the Port only a few hundred yards ahead. The journey was nearly ended. In a few moments, this evil plain would be no more than a fading nightmare.
It seemed terribly unfair: so little time, such a small fraction of a human life, was all he needed now. But the gods have always been unfair to man, and now they were enjoying their little jest. For there could be no mistaking the rattle of monstrous claws in the darkness ahead of him.
Silence Please
First published in Science-Fantasy, Winter 1950 as ‘Silence Please!’ as by ‘Charles Willis’
Collected in Tales from the White Hart
Negative feedback noise eliminators are now on the market – and already have many engineering applications. I recently purchased a pair of earphones that were supposed to eliminate ambient sound: however, I doubt if anything as versatile as the Fenton Silencer will ever be on the market.
You come upon the ‘White Hart’ quite unexpectedly in one of these anonymous little lanes leading down from Fleet Street to the Embankment. It’s no use telling you where it is: very few people who have set out in a determined effort to get there have ever actually arrived. For the first dozen visits a guide is essential: after that you’ll probably be all right if you close your eyes and rely on instinct. Also – to be perfectly frank – we don’t want any more customers, at least on our night. The place is already uncomfortably crowded. All that I’ll say about its location is that it shakes occasionally with the vibration of newspaper presses, and that if you crane out of the window of the gents’ room you can just see the Thames.
From the outside, it looks like any other pub – as indeed it is for five days of the week. The public and saloon bars are on the ground floor: there are the usual vistas of brown oak panelling and frosted glass, the bottles behind the bar, the handles of the beer engines … nothing out of the ordinary at all. Indeed, the only concession to the twentieth century is the jukebox in the public bar. It was installed during the war in a laughable attempt to make G.I.s feel at home, and one of the first things we did was to make sure there was no danger of its ever working again.
At this point I had better explain who ‘we’ are. That is not as easy as I thought it was going to be when I started, for a complete catalogue of the ‘White Hart’s’ clients would probably be impossible and would certainly be excruciatingly tedious. So all I’ll say at this point is that ‘we’ fall into three main classes. First there are the journalists, writers and editors. The journalists, of course, gravitated here from Fleet Street. Those who couldn’t make the grade fled elsewhere; the tougher ones remained. As for the writers, most of them heard about us from other writers, came here for copy, and got trapped.
Where there are writers, of course, there are sooner or later editors. If Drew, our landlord, got a percentage on the literary business done in his bar, he’d be a rich man. (We suspect he is a rich man, anyway.) One of our wits once remarked that it was a common sight to see half a dozen indignant authors arguing with a hard-faced editor in one corner of the ‘White Hart’, while in another, half a dozen indignant editors argued with a hard-faced author.
So much for the literary side: you will have, I’d better warn you, ample opportunities for close-ups later. Now let us glance briefly at the scientists. How did they get in here?
Well, Birkbeck College is only across the road, and King’s is just a few hundred yards along the Strand. That’s doubtless part of the explanation, and again personal recommendation had a lot to do with it. Also, many of our scientists are writers, and not a few of our writers are scientists. Confusing, but we like it that way.
The third portion of our little microcosm consists of what may be loosely termed ‘interested laymen’. They were attracted to the ‘White Hart’, by the general brouhaha, and enjoyed the conversation and company so much that they now come along regularly every Wednesday – which is the day when we all get together. Sometimes they can’t stand the pace and fall by the wayside, but there’s always a fresh supply.
With such potent ingredients, it is hardly surprising that Wednesday at the ‘White Hart’ is seldom dull. Not only hav
e some remarkable stories been told there, but remarkable things have happened there. For example, there was the time when Professor—, passing through on his way to Harwell left behind a briefcase containing – well, we’d better not go into that, even though we did so at the time. And most interesting it was, too…. Any Russian agents will find me in the corner under the dartboard. I come high, but easy terms can be arranged.
Now that I’ve finally thought of the idea, it seems astonishing to me that none of my colleagues has ever got round to writing up these stories. Is it a question of being so close to the wood that they can’t see the trees? Or is it lack of incentive? No, the last explanation can hardly hold: several of them are quite as hard up as I am, and have complained with equal bitterness about Drew’s ‘NO CREDIT’ rule. My only fear, as I type these words on my old Remington Noiseless, is that John Christopher or George Whitley or John Beynon are already hard at work using up the best material. Such as, for instance, the story of the Fenton Silencer …
I don’t know when it began: one Wednesday is much like another and it’s hard to tag dates onto them. Besides, people may spend a couple of months lost in the ‘White Hart’ crowd before you first notice their existence. That had probably happened to Harry Purvis, because when I first became aware of him he already knew the names of most of the people in our crowd. Which is more than I do these days, now that I come to think of it.
Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke Page 36