Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke

by C. , Clarke, Arthur

  ‘These people are from – somewhere else. Our world is being systematically looted of its treasures. You know all this stuff you read about rockets and spaceships? Well, someone else has done it first.’

  Ashton didn’t laugh. The theory was no more fantastic than the facts.

  ‘Whoever they are,’ he said, ‘they seem to know their way around pretty well. I wonder how many teams they’ve got? Perhaps the Louvre and the Prado are being reconnoitred at this very minute. The world is going to have a shock before the day’s out.’

  They parted amicably enough, neither confiding any details of real importance about his business. For a fleeting moment Ashton thought of trying to buy over Tony, but there was no point in antagonising Albenkian. Steve Regan would have to do. That meant walking about a mile, since of course any form of transport was impossible. He would die of old age before a bus completed the journey. Ashton was not clear what would happen if he attempted to drive a car when the field was operating, and he had been warned not to try any experiments.

  It astonished Ashton that even such a nearly certified moron as Steve could take the accelerator so calmly; there was something to be said, after all, for the comic strips which were probably his only reading. After a few words of grossly simplified explanation, Steve buckled on the spare wristlet which, rather to Ashton’s surprise, his visitor had handed over without comment. Then they set out on their long walk to the Museum.

  Ashton, or his client, had thought of everything. They stopped once at a park bench to rest and enjoy some sandwiches and regain their breath. When at last they reached the Museum, neither felt any the worse for the unaccustomed exercise.

  They walked together though the gates of the Museum – unable, despite logic, to avoid speaking in whispers – and up the wide stone steps into the entrance hall. Ashton knew his way perfectly. With whimsical humour he displayed his Reading Room ticket as they walked, at a respectful distance, past the statuesque attendants. It occurred to him that the occupants of the great chamber, for the most part, looked just the same as they normally did, even without the benefit of the accelerator.

  It was a straightforward but tedious job collecting the books that had been listed. They had been chosen, it seemed, for their beauty as works of art as much as for their literary content. The selection had been done by someone who knew his job. Had they done it themselves, Ashton wondered, or had they bribed other experts as they were bribing him? He wondered if he would ever glimpse the full ramifications of their plot.

  There was a considerable amount of panel-smashing to be done, but Ashton was careful not to damage any books, even the unwanted ones. Whenever he had collected enough volumes to make a comfortable load, Steve carried them out into the courtyard and dumped them on the paving stones until a small pyramid had accumulated.

  It would not matter if they were left for short periods outside the field of the accelerator. No one would notice their momentary flicker of existence in the normal world.

  They were in the library for two hours of their time, and paused for another snack before passing to the next job. On the way Ashton stopped for a little private business. There was a tinkle of glass as the tiny case, standing in solitary splendour, yielded up its treasure: then the manuscript of Alice was safely tucked into Ashton’s pocket.

  Among the antiquities, he was not quite so much at home. There were a few examples to be taken from every gallery, and sometimes it was hard to see the reasons for the choice. It was as if – and again he remembered Albenkian’s words – these works of art had been selected by someone with totally alien standards. This time, with a few exceptions, they had obviously not been guided by the experts.

  For the second time in history the case of the Portland Vase was shattered. In five seconds, thought Ashton, the alarms would be going all over the Museum and the whole building would be in an uproar. And in five seconds he could be miles away. It was an intoxicating thought, and as he worked swiftly to complete his contract he began to regret the price he had asked. Even now, it was not too late.

  He felt the quiet satisfaction of the good workman as he watched Steve carry the great silver tray of the Mildenhall Treasure out into the courtyard and place it beside the now impressive pile. ‘That’s the lot,’ he said. ‘I’ll settle up at my place this evening. Now let’s get this gadget off you.’

  They walked out into High Holborn and chose a secluded side street that had no pedestrians near it. Ashton unfastened the peculiar buckle and stepped back from his cohort, watching him freeze into immobility as he did so. Steve was vulnerable again, moving once more with all the other men in the stream of time. But before the alarm had gone out he would have lost himself in the London crowds.

  When he re-entered the Museum yard, the treasure had already gone. Standing where it had been was his visitor of – how long ago? She was still poised and graceful, but, Ashton thought, looking a little tired. He approached until their fields merged and they were no longer separated by an impassable gulf of silence. ‘I hope you’re satisfied,’ he said. ‘How did you move the stuff so quickly?’

  She touched the bracelet around her own wrist and gave a wan smile. ‘We have many other powers beside this.’

  ‘Then why did you need my help?’

  ‘There were technical reasons. It was necessary to remove the objects we required from the presence of other matter. In this way, we could gather only what we needed and not waste our limited – what shall I call them? – transporting facilities. Now may I have the bracelet back?’

  Ashton slowly handed over the one he was carrying, but made no effort to unfasten his own. There might be danger in what he was doing, but he intended to retreat at the first sign of it.

  ‘I’m prepared to reduce my fee,’ he said. ‘In fact I’ll waive all payment – in exchange for this.’ He touched his wrist, where the intricate metal band gleamed in the sunlight.

  She was watching him with an expression as fathomless as the Gioconda smile. (Had that, Ashton wondered, gone to join the treasure he had gathered? How much had they taken from the Louvre?)

  ‘I would not call that reducing your fee. All the money in the world could not purchase one of those bracelets.’

  ‘Or the things I have given you.’

  ‘You are greedy, Mr Ashton. You know that with an accelerator the entire world would be yours.’

  ‘What of that? Do you have any further interest in our planet, now you have taken what you need?’

  There was a pause. Then, unexpectedly, she smiled. ‘So you have guessed I do not belong to your world.’

  ‘Yes. And I know that you have other agents besides myself. Do you come from Mars, or won’t you tell me?’

  ‘I am quite willing to tell you. But you may not thank me if I do.’

  Ashton looked at her warily. What did she mean by that? Unconscious of his action, he put his wrist behind his back, protecting the bracelet.

  ‘No, I am not from Mars, or any planet of which you have ever heard. You would not understand what I am. Yet I will tell you this. I am from the Future.’

  ‘The Future! That’s ridiculous!’

  ‘Indeed? I should be interested to know why.’

  ‘If that sort of thing were possible, our past history would be full of time travellers. Besides, it would involve a reductio ad absurdum. Going into the past could change the present and produce all sorts of paradoxes.’

  ‘Those are good points, though not perhaps as original as you suppose. But they only refute the possibility of time travel in general, not in the very special case which concerns us now.’

  ‘What is peculiar about it?’ he asked.

  ‘On very rare occasions, and by the release of an enormous amount of energy, it is possible to produce a – singularity – in time. During the fraction of a second when that singularity occurs, the past becomes accessible to the future, though only in a restricted way. We can send our minds back to you, but not our bodies.’

  ‘Y
ou mean,’ said Ashton, ‘that you are borrowing the body I see?’

  ‘Oh, I have paid for it, as I am paying you. The owner has agreed to the terms. We are very conscientious in these matters.’

  Ashton was thinking swiftly. If this story was true, it gave him a definite advantage.

  ‘You mean,’ he continued, ‘that you have no direct control over matter, and must work through human agents?’

  ‘Yes. Even those bracelets were made here, under our mental control.’

  She was explaining too much too readily, revealing all her weaknesses. A warning signal was flashing in the back of Ashton’s mind, but he had committed himself too deeply to retreat.

  ‘Then it seems to me,’ he said slowly, ‘that you cannot force me to hand this bracelet back.’

  ‘That is perfectly true.’

  ‘That’s all I want to know.’

  She was smiling at him now, and there was something in that smile that chilled him to the marrow.

  ‘We are not vindictive or unkind, Mr Ashton,’ she said quietly. ‘What I am going to do now appeals to my sense of justice. You have asked for that bracelet; you can keep it. Now I shall tell you just how useful it will be.’

  For a moment Ashton had a wild impulse to hand back the accelerator. She must have guessed his thoughts.

  ‘No, it’s too late. I insist that you keep it. And I can reassure you on one point. It won’t wear out. It will last you’ – again that enigmatic smile – ‘the rest of your life.

  ‘Do you mind if we go for a walk, Mr Ashton? I have done my work here, and would like to have a last glimpse of your world before I leave it forever.’

  She turned toward the iron gates, and did not wait for a reply. Consumed by curiosity, Ashton followed.

  They walked in silence until they were standing among the frozen traffic of Tottenham Court Road. For a while she stood staring at the busy yet motionless crowds; then she sighed.

  ‘I cannot help feeling sorry for them, and for you. I wonder what you would have made of yourselves.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Just now, Mr Ashton, you implied that the future cannot reach back into the past, because that would alter history. A shrewd remark, but, I am afraid, irrelevant. You see, your world has no more history to alter.’

  She pointed across the road, and Ashton turned swiftly on his heels. There was nothing there except a newsboy crouching over his pile of papers. A placard formed an impossible curve in the breeze that was blowing through this motionless world. Ashton read the crudely lettered words with difficulty:

  SUPER-BOMB TEST TODAY

  The voice in his ears seemed to come from a very long way off.

  ‘I told you that time travel, even in this restricted form, requires an enormous release of energy – far more than a single bomb can liberate, Mr Ashton. But that bomb is only a trigger—’

  She pointed to the solid ground beneath their feet. ‘Do you know anything about your own planet? Probably not; your race has learned so little. But even your scientists have discovered that, two thousand miles down, the Earth has a dense, liquid core. That core is made of compressed matter, and it can exist in either of two stable states. Given a certain stimulus, it can change from one of those states to another, just as a seesaw can tip over at the touch of a finger. But that change, Mr Ashton, will liberate as much energy as all the earthquakes since the beginning of your world. The oceans and continents will fly into space; the sun will have a second asteroid belt.

  ‘That cataclysm will send its echoes down the ages, and will open up to us a fraction of a second in your time. During that instant, we are trying to save what we can of your world’s treasures. It is all that we can do; even if your motives were purely selfish and completely dishonest, you have done your race a service you never intended.

  ‘And now I must return to our ship, where it waits by the ruins of Earth almost a hundred thousand years from now. You can keep the bracelet.’

  The withdrawal was instantaneous. The woman suddenly froze and became one with the other statues in the silent street. He was alone.

  Alone! Ashton held the gleaming bracelet before his eyes, hypnotised by its intricate workmanship and by the powers it concealed. He had made a bargain, and he must keep it. He could live out the full span of his life – at the cost of an isolation no other man had ever known. If he switched off the field, the last seconds of history would tick inexorably away.

  Seconds? Indeed, there was less time than that. For he knew that the bomb must already have exploded.

  He sat down on the edge of the pavement and began to think. There was no need to panic; he must take things calmly, without hysteria. After all, he had plenty of time.

  All the time in the world.

  The Nine Billion Names of God

  First published in Star Science Fiction Stories #1, ed. Frederik Pohl, 1953

  Collected in The Other Side of the Sky

  This story triggered a charming response from the highest possible authority – His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

  ‘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. Modifying 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 W
agner hastily. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Luckily, it will be a simple matter to adapt your Automatic Sequence Computer for this work, since once it has been programmed 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.’