Professor O’Hanion turned to Hunicutt. i “Goodnight, my boy,” he. said softly. “Get a good night’s rest. We’ve a lot of work ahead of us.”
NO MORNING AFTER
Arthur C. Clarke
“But this is terrible!” said the Supreme Scientist. “Surely there is something we can do!’v
“Yes, Your Cognizance, but it will be extremely difficult. The planet is more than five hundred light-years away, and it is very hard to maintain contact However, we believe we can establish a bridgehead. Unfortunately, that is not the only problem. So far, we have been quite unable to communicate with these beings. Their telepathic powers are exceedingly rudimentary—perhaps even non-existent. And if we cannot talk to them, there is no way in which we can help.”
There was a long mental silence while the Supreme Scientist analyzed the situation and arrived, as he always did, at the correct answer.
“Any intelligent race must have some telepathic individuals,” he mused. “We must send out hundreds of observers, tuned to catch the first hint of stray thought. When you find a single responsive mind, concentrate all your efforts upon it. We must get our message through.”
“Very good, Your Cognizance. It shall be done.”
Across the abyss, across the gulf which light itself took half a thousand years to span, the questing intellects of the planet Thaar sent out their tendrils of thought, searching desperately for a single human being whose mind could perceive their presence. And as luck would have it, they encountered William Cross.
At least, they thought it was luck at the time, though later they were not so sure. In any case, they had little choice. The combination of circumstances which opened Bill’s mind to them lasted only for seconds, and was not likely to occur again this side of eternity.
There were three ingredients to the miracle: it is hard to say if one was more important than another. The first was the accident of position. A flask of water, when sunlight falls upon it, can act as a crude lens, concentrating the light into a small area. On an immeasurably larger scale, the dense core of the Earth was converging the waves that came from Thaar. In the ordinary way, the radiations of thought are unaffected by matter—they pass through it as effortlessly as light through glass. But there is rather a lot of matter in a planet, and the whole Earth was acting as a gigantic lens. As it turned, it was carrying Bill through its focus, where the feeble thought-impulses from Thaar were concentrated a hundredfold.
Yet millions of other men were equally well placed: they received no message. But they were not rocket engineers: they had not spent years thinking and dreaming of space, until -it had become part of their very being.
And they were not, as Bill was, blind drunk, teetering on the last knife-edge of consciousness, trying to escape from reality into the world of dreams, where there were no disappointments and setbacks.
Of course, he could see the Army’s point of view. “You are paid, Dr. Cross,” General Potter had pointed out with unnecessary emphasis, “to design missiles, not—ah—spaceships. What you do in your spare time is your own concern, but I must ask you not to use the facilities of the establishment for your hobby. From now on, all projects for the computing section will have to be cleared by me. That is all.”
They couldn’t sack him, of course: he was too important But he was not sure that he wanted to stay. He was not really sure of anything except that the job had backfired on him, and that Brenda had finally gone off with Johnny Gardner —putting events in their order of importance.
Wavering slightly, Bill cupped his chin in his hands and stared at the white-washed brick wall on the other side of the table. The only attempt at ornamentation was a calendar from Lockheed and a glossy six by eight from Aerojet showing L’il Abner Mark I making a boosted takeoff. Bill gazed morosely at a spot midway between the two pictures, and emptied his mind of thought The barriers went down. . . .
At that moment, the massed intellects of Thaar gave a soundless cry of triumph, and the wall in front of Bill slowly dissolved into* a swirling mist. He appeared to be looking down a tunnel that stretched to infinity. As a matter of fact, he was.
Bill studied the phenomenon with mild interest. It had a certain novelty, but was not up to the standard of previous hallucinations. And when the voice started to speak in his mind, he let it ramble on for some time before he did anything about it. Even when drunk, he had an old-fashioned prejudice against starting conversations with himself.
“Bill,” the voice began. “Listen carefully. We have had great difficulty in contacting you, and this is extremely important.”
Bill doubted this on general principles. Nothing Was important any more.
“We are speaking to you from a very distant planet,” continued the voice in a tone of urgent friendliness. “You are the only human being we have been able to contact, so you must understand what we are saying.”
Bill felt mildly worried, though in an impersonal sort of way, since it was now' rather hard to focus onto his own problems. How serious was it, he wondered, when you started to hear voices? Well, it was best not to get excited. You can take it or leave it, Dr. Cross, he told himself. Let’s take it until it gets a nuisance.
“O. K.” he answered with bored indifference. “Go right ahead and talk to me. I won’t mind as long as it’s interesting.” There was a pause. Then the voice continued, in a slightly worried fashion.
“We don’t quite understand. Our message isn’t merely interesting. It’s vital to your entire race, and you must notify your government immediately.”
“I’m waiting,” said Bill. “It helps to pass the time.”
Five hundred light-years away, the Thaams conferred hastily among themselves. Something seemed to be wrong, but they could not decide precisely what. There was no doubt that they had established contact, yet this was not the sort of reaction they had expected. Well, they could only proceed and hope for the best.
“Listen, Bill,” they continued. “Our scientists have just discovered that ^our sun is about to explode. It will happen three days from now—seventy-four hours, to be exact. Nothing can stop it. But there’s no need to be alarmed. We can save you, if you’ll do what we say.”
“Go on,” said Bill. This hallucination was ingenious. “We can create what we call a bridge—it’s a kind of tunnel through space, like the one you’re looking into now. The theory is far too complicated to explain, even to one of your mathematicians.”
“Hold on a minute!” protested Bill. “I am a mathematician, and a dam good one, even when I’m sober. And I’ve read all about this kind of thing in the science-fiction magazines. I presume you’re talking about some kind of short-cut through a higher dimension of space. That’s old stuff—pre-Einstein.”
A sensation of distinct surprise seeped into Bill’s mind. “We had no idea you were so advanced scientifically,” said the Thaams. “But we haven’t time to talk about the theory. All that matters is this—if you were to step into that opening in front of you, you’d find yourself instantly on another planet. It’s a short-cut, as you said—in this case, through the thirty-seventh dimension.”
“And it leads to your world?”
“Oh no—you couldn’t live here. But there are plenty of planets like Earth in the universe, and we’ve found one that will suit you. We’ll establish bridgeheads like this all over Earth, so your people will only have to walk through them to be saved. Of course, they’ll have to start building up civilization again when they reach their new homes, but it’s their only hope. You have to pass on this message, and tell them what to do.”
“I can just see them listening to me,” said Bill. “Why don’t you go and talk to the President?”
“Because yours was the only mind we were able to contact. Others seemed closed to us: we don’t understand why.” “I could tell you,” said Bill, looking at the nearly empty bottle in front of him. He was certainly getting his money’s worth. What a remarkable thing the human mind was! Of course, there was
nothing at all original in this dialogue: it was easy to see where the ideas came,from. Only last week he’d been reading a story about the end of the world, and all this wishful thinking about bridges and tunnels through space was pretty obvious compensation for anyone who’d spent five years wrestling with recalcitrant rockets.
“If the sun does blow up,” Bill asked abruptly—trying to catch his hallucination unawares—“what would happen?” “Why, your planet would be melted instantly. All the planets, in fact, right out to Jupiter.”
Bill had to admit that this was quite a grandiose conception. He let his mind play with the thought, and the more he considered it, the more he liked it.
“My dear hallucination,” he remarked pityingly. “If I believed you, d’you know what I’d say?”
“But you must believe us!” came the despairing cry across the light-years.
Bill ignored it. He was warming to his theme.
“I’d tell you this. It would be the best thing that could possibly happen. Yes, it would save a whole lot of misery. No one would have to worry about the Russians and the atom bomb and the high cost of living. Oh, it would be wonderful! It’s just what everybody really wants. Nice of you to come along and tell us, but just you go back home and pull your old bridge after you.”
There was consternation on Thaar. The Supreme Scientist’s brain, floating like a great mass of coral in its tank of nutrient solution, turned slightly yellow about the edges— something it had not done since the Xantil invasion, five thousand years ago. At least fifteen psychologists had nervous breakdowns and were never the same again. The main computer in the College of Cosmophysics started dividing every number in its memory circuits by zero, and promptly blew all its fuses.
And on Earth, Bill Cross was really hitting his stride. “Look at me,” he said, pointing a wavering finger at his chest. “I’ve spent years trying to make rockets do something useful, and they tell me I’m only allowed to build guided missiles, so that we can all blow each other up. The Sun will make a neater job of it, and if you did give us another planet we’d only start the whole damn thing all over again.” He paused sadly, marshaling his morbid thoughts.
“And now Brenda heads out of town without even leaving a note. So you’ll pardon my lack of enthusiasm for-, your Boy Scout act.”
He couldn’t have said “enthusiasm” aloud, Bill realized.
But he could still think it, which was an interesting scientific discovery. As he got drunker and drunker, would his cogitation—whoops, that nearly threw him!—finally drop down to words of one syllable?
In a final despairing exertion, the Thaams sent their thoughts along the tunnel between the stars.
“You can’t really mean it, Bill! Are all human beings like you?”
Now that was an interesting philosophical question.' Bill considered it carefully—or as carefully as he could in view of the warm, rosy glow that was now beginning to envelope him. After all, things might be worse. He could get another job, if only for the pleasure of telling General Porter what he could do with his three stars. And as for Brenda—well, women were like streetcars: there’d always be another along in a minute.
Best of all, there was a second bottle of whiskey in the TOP SECRET file. Oh, frabjous day! He rose unsteadily to his feet and wavered across the room.
For the last time, Thaar spoke to Earth.
“Bill!” it repeated desperately. “Surely all human beings can’t be like you!”
Bill turned and looked into the swirling tunnel. Strange— it seemed to be lit with flecks of starlight, and was really rather pretty. He felt proud of himself: not many people could imagine that.
“Like me?” he' said. “No, they’re not.” He smiled smugly across the light-years, as the rising ride of euphoria lifted him out of his despondency. “Come to think of it,” he added, “there are a lot of people much worse off than me. Yes, I guess I must be one of the lucky ones, after all.”
He blinked in mild surprise, for the tunnel had suddenly collapsed upon itself and the whitewashed wall was there again, exactly as it had always been. Thaar knew when it was beaten.
“So much for that hallucination,” thought Bill. “I was getting tired of it, anyway. Let’s see what the next one’s like.”
As it happened, there wasn’t a next one, for five seconds later he passed out cold, just as he was setting the combination of the file cabinet.
The next two days were rather vague and bloodshot, and he forgot all about the interview.
On the third day something was nagging at the back of his mind: he might have remembered if Brenda hadn’t turned up again and kept him busy being forgiving.
And there wasn’t a fourth day, of course.
HOLE IN THE SKY
Irving Cox, Jr.
Bwani Ngani sat sulking in his hut, the night noises of the jungle throbbing outside the skin-draped door. In the flickering firelight his string of leering god-masks threw long shadows on the thatched ceiling. Bwani Ngani dropped the spell-powder into the blaze and whispered his prayer of hate. For ten years the mission people had been encroaching on his control of the tribe; but now they had gone too far. If the son of the chief took a bride without making the ancient sacrifices, the old gods would die.
Yet none of it would have happened if the Reverend Colwaite had been destroyed first. Bwani Ngani’s voice rose steadily, and he went outside his hut, staring up at the sky.
“Hear me, Oh demons of the forest,” he intoned. “Hear me, Oh God of the Thousand Eyes!” He looked up at the stars. After a time he saw the sign, and his heart exulted. . ..
. . . Emil Padgham was furiously angry when he saw it. Short, round, and pink-faced, Dr. Padgham gave the impression of a mild-mannered old man, a stereotype of the typical Professor Emeritus. Normally he lived up to his appearance; but now his day had been a long series of nagging, frustrations, underscored and exaggerated by the brittle, glaring heat that lay over the campus. Even at sunset there was no welcome breeze from the bay.
As soon as Milly began to clear away the dinner dishes, Dr. Padgham stormed out to the little observatory he had built over his garage. Almost at once he was at the door again, yelling across the lawn at his sister, working in the kitchen.
“Milly! I told you not to let those kids in here again!”
“I didn’t, Emil. I’ve kept, the door locked and—”
“Well, they were here. They’ve been fooling with the telescope.”
“Oh, I don’t think so, Emil. You’re just upset because you missed your nap.” She spoke quietly, wearily patient.
“It’s a trick!” he cried. “The oldest trick in the world. What do they take me for? A doddering fool in his dotage?” The comparison lashed at his mind as if someone had actually called him names. “Bring me the alcohol, Milly—the bottle on the pantry shelf—so I can clean the lens.”
“In a moment, Emil; as soon as I—”
“I want it now!”
“When I finish the dishes, Emil.” Her voice was suddenly sharp. He heard the kitchen window bang shut and he knew she was angry, too.
Dr. Padgham flung himself into the chair beneath his telescope, mopping his forehead. The heat in that tiny, cluttered room was suffocating. The professor sat surrounded by shelves crammed with a chaos of unrelated things; a collection of butterflies and a stamp album; shelves of chemicals; a photographic enlarger; a ham transmitter; a dozen handbooks of astronomy. Dr. Padgham’s hobby room contained a little of everything—except any reminder of the subject he had taught for more than thirty years.
Dr. Padgham, for two decades the head of the English department, had retired from the university faculty two years before, but he still lived on Faculty Avenue, and he was still a familiar campus figure. In the year of his retirement Dr. Padgham’s seventeenth book had come off the press. Unlike its sixteen predecessors, the book had been immensely popular. Dr. Padgham used the unexpected windfall of royalty checks to build his hobby room over the garage. For a q
uarter of a century he had wanted to, dabble in the sciences taught by his colleagues on the faculty; now he could. Overnight he turned literature out of his mind, and took up everything else.
At the moment, astronomy occupied his attention. He had bought a telescope and turned his garage room into an improvised observatory. His direct-view glass was an excellent one, however tiny in comparison with the equipment of the university observatory on* Ryder Hill, overlooking the campus. Although he frequently used the observatory and was on excellent terms with both Dr. Bullett arid Dr. Crane, Dr. Padgham felt more at home with his own telescope.
He sat for some minutes glaring at the metal cylinder. After his anger cooled a little, he looked through the glass again.; The thing was still there, a tiny point almost touching Jupiter. Of course, the kids had got into the hobby room that afternoon and painted it on the lens. Milly was always careless with keys. No doubt they expected him to play the fool and to claim the discovery of a new heavenly body. It was not the trick that infuriated him, but the fact that the neighborhood children apparently thought so little Of his intelligence.
Dr. Padgham’s hand shook as he attempted to adjust the focus. In his clumsiness he moved the glass itself; but the black dot so close to Jupiter did not move with-it.
Nothing, then, was on the lens!
As he realized what that implied, his sister entered the room behind him, bringing the bottle of alcohol. Milly was a thin wisp of a woman, tiny, white-haired and motherly. For ten years—since the death of the professor’s wife—she had been his housekeeper. She banged the bottle down on a workbench and folded her arms indignantly/"
“There,” she said. “Perhaps I should make one thing clear to you, Emil: I have my own work to do in the house. If you must play Wound with -your toys, you can at least have the patience—”
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