Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (6 page)

‘Although my psychometer and televisor had been destroyed, I was determined not to be defeated so easily, and started hunting with the ship’s televisor, which though not made for this kind of work could do it very well. Since I lacked the essential psychometer it was some time before I found what I was looking for. I had to explore great sections of the ground with my instrument, focusing the view point through stratum after stratum and examining any suspicious rock that came into the field. When I was at a depth of nearly two hundred feet, I noticed a dark mass looming faintly in the distance, rather like a very large boulder embedded in the soil. But when I approached I saw with a great feeling of elation that it was no boulder, but a perfect sphere of metal, about twenty feet in diameter. My search had ended. There was a slight fading of the image as I drove the beam through the metal, and then on the screen lay revealed the lair of the super-termite.

‘I had expected to find some fantastic creature, perhaps a great naked brain with vestigial limbs, but at a glance I could see that there was no living thing in that sphere. From wall to wall that metal-enclosed space was packed with a maze of machinery, most of it very minute and almost unthinkably complex, and all of it clicking and buzzing with lightning-like rapidity. Compared to this miracle of electrical engineering, our great television exchanges would seem the creations of children or savages. I could see myriads of tiny relays operating, director valves flashing intermittently, and strangely shaped cams spinning among moving mazes of apparatus utterly unlike anything we have ever built. To the makers of this machinery, my atomic generator must have seemed a toy.

‘For perhaps two seconds I gazed in wonder at that amazing sight, and then, suddenly and incredibly, an obliterating veil of interference slashed down and the screen was a dancing riot of formless colour.

‘Here was something we have never been able to produce – a screen which the televisor could not penetrate. The power of this strange creature was even greater than I had imagined, and in the face of this latest revelation I no longer felt safe even in my ship. In fact, I had a sudden desire to put as many miles as possible between myself and Termite Island. This impulse was so strong that a minute later I was high over the Pacific, rising up through the stratosphere in the great ellipse which would curve down again in England.

‘Yes, you may smile or accuse me of cowardice, saying that my grandfather Vorac would not have done so – but listen.

‘I was about a hundred miles from the island, thirty miles high and already travelling at two thousand miles an hour when there came a sudden crashing of relays, and the low purr of the motors changed to a tremendous deep-throated roar as an overload was thrown on to them. A glance at the board showed me what had happened – the ray screens were on, flaring beneath the impact of a heavy induction beam. But there was comparatively little power behind the beam, though had I been nearer it would have been a very different tale, and my screens dissipated it without much trouble. Nevertheless, the occurrence gave me an unpleasant shock for the moment, until I remembered that old trick of electrical warfare and threw the full field of my geodesic generators into the beam. I switched on the televisor just in time to see the incandescent fragments of Termite Island fall back into the Pacific …

‘So I returned to England, with one problem solved and a dozen greater ones formulated. How was it that the termite-brain, as I supposed the machine to be, had never revealed itself to humans? They have often destroyed the homes of its peoples, but as far as I know it has never retaliated. Yet directly I appeared it attacked me, though I was doing it no harm! Perhaps, by some obscure means, it knew that I was not a man, but an adversary worthy of its powers. Or perhaps, though I do not put the suggestion seriously, it is a kind of guardian protecting Three from invaders such as ourselves.

‘Somewhere there is an inconsistency that I cannot understand. On the one hand we have that incredible intelligence possessing much, if not all of our knowledge, while on the other are the blind, relatively helpless insects waging an endless war with puny weapons against enemies their ruler could exterminate instantly and without effort. Behind this mad system there must be a purpose, but it is beyond my comprehension. The only rational explanation I can conceive is that for most of the time the termite brain is content to let its subjects go their own, mechanical ways, and that only very seldom, perhaps once in an age, does it take an active part in guiding them. As long as it is not seriously interfered with, it is content to let man do what he likes. It may even take a benevolent interest in him and his works.

‘Fortunately for us, the super-termite is not invulnerable. Twice it miscalculated in its dealings with me, and the second time cost it its existence – I cannot say life. I am confident that we can overcome the creature, for it, or others like it, still control the remaining billions of the race. I have just returned from Africa, and termites there are still organised as they have always been. On this excursion I did not leave my ship, or even land. I believe I have incurred the enmity of an entire race and I am taking no chances. Until I have an armoured cruiser and a staff of expert biologists, I am leaving the termites strictly alone. Even then I shall not feel quite safe, for there may be yet more powerful intelligences on Three than the one I encountered. That is a risk we must take, for unless we can defeat these beings, Planet Three will never be safe for our kind.’

The President cut off the record and turned to the waiting assembly.

‘You have heard Theton’s report,’ he said, ‘I appreciate its importance and at once sent a heavy cruiser to Three. As soon as it arrived, Theton boarded it and left for the Pacific.

‘That was two days ago. Since then I have heard from neither Theton nor the cruiser, but I do know this:

‘An hour after the ship left England, we picked up the radiations from her screens, and in a very few seconds other disturbances – cosmics, ultra-cosmics, induction and tremendous long-wave, low quantum radiations such as we have never used in battle – began to come through in ever-increasing quantities. This lasted for nearly three minutes, when suddenly there came one titanic blast of energy, lasting for a fraction of a second and then – nothing. That final burst of power could have been caused by nothing less than the detonation of an entire atomic generating plant, and must have jarred Three to its core.

‘I have called this meeting to put the facts of the matter before you and to ask you to vote on the subject. Shall we abandon our plans for Three, or shall we send one of our most powerful super-dreadnoughts to the planet? One ship could do as much as an entire section of the Fleet in this matter, and would be safe, in case … but I cannot imagine any power which could defeat such a ship as our “Zuranther”. Will you please register your votes in the usual way? It will be a great setback if we cannot colonise Three, but it is not the only planet in the system, though it is the fairest.’

There came subdued clicks and a faint humming of motors as the councillors pressed their coloured buttons, and on the television screen appeared the words: For 967; Against 233.

‘Very well, the “Zuranther” will leave at once for Three. This time we will follow her movements with the televisor and then if anything does go wrong, we shall at least obtain some idea of the weapons the enemy uses.’

Hours later the tremendous mass of the flagship of the Martian fleet dropped thunderously through the outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere towards the far-off waters of the Pacific. She fell in the heart of a tornado, for her captain was taking no chances and the winds of the stratosphere were being annihilated by her flaming ray screens.

But on a tiny island far over the eastern horizon, the termites had been preparing for the attack they knew must come, and strange, fragile mechanisms had been erected by myriad blind and toiling insects. The great Martian warship was two hundred miles away when her captain located the island in his televisor. His finger reached towards the button which would start the enormous ray generators, but swift as he was the almost instant acting relays of the termite mind were far swifter. Though, in any case, the outcome would have been the same.

The great spherical screens did not flare even once as the enemy struck home. Their slim rapier of pure heat was driven by only a score of horsepower, while behind the shields of the warship were a thousand million. But the feeble heat beam of the termites never passed through those screens – it reached out through hyperspace to gnaw at the very vitals of the ship. The Martians could not check an enemy who struck from within their defences, an enemy to whom a sphere was no more a barrier than a hollow ring.

The termite rulers, those alien beings from outer space, had kept their agreement with the old lords of Earth, and had saved man from the danger his ancestors had long ago foreseen.

But the watching assembly knew only that the screens of the ship which had been blazing fiercely one moment had erupted in a hurricane of flame and a numbing concussion of sound, while for a thousand miles around fragments of white-hot metal were dropping from the heavens.

Slowly the President turned to face the Council and whispered in a low, strained voice, ‘I think it had better be planet Two, after all.’

Reverie

First published in
New Worlds
, Autumn 1939

Not previously collected in book form

‘All the ideas in science fiction have been used up!’

How often we’ve heard this moan from editors, authors and fans, any one of whom should know better. Even if it were true, which is the last thing it is, it would signify nothing. How long ago do you think the themes of ordinary, mundane fiction were used up? Somewhere in the late Paleolithic, I should say. Which fact has made exactly no difference to the overwhelming outrush of modern masterpieces, four a shilling in the third tray from the left.

No. The existing material is sufficient to provide an infinite number of stories, each individual and each worth reading. Too much stress is laid on new ideas, or ‘thought-variants’, on ‘novae’. They are all very well in their way – and it’s a way that leads to strange, delightful regions of fantasy – but at least as important are characterisation and the ability to treat a commonplace theme in your own individual style. And for this reason, in spite of all his critics, I maintain that if any could equal Weinbaum, none could surpass him.

If, in addition to its purely literary qualities, a story has a novel idea, so much the better. Notwithstanding the pessimists, there are a million million themes that science fiction has never touched. Even in these days of deepening depression, a few really original plots still lighten our darkness. ‘The Smile of the Sphinx’ was such a one; going a good deal further back we have ‘The Human Termites’, perhaps the best of all its kind before the advent of ‘Sinister Barrier’.

As long as science advances, as long as mathematics discovers incredible worlds where twice two would never dream of equalling four, so new ideas will come tumbling into the mind of anyone who will let his thoughts wander, passport in hand, along the borders of Possibility. There are no Customs regulations; anything you see in your travels in those neighbouring lands you can bring back with you. But in the country of the Impossible there are many wonders too delicate and too fragile to survive transportation.

Nothing in this world is ever really new, yet everything is in some way different from all that has gone before. At least once in his life even the dullest of us has found himself contemplating with amazement and perhaps with fear, some thought so original and so startling that it seems the creation of an exterior, infinitely more subtle mind. Such thoughts pass through the consciousness so swiftly that they are gone before they can be more than glimpsed, but sometimes like comets trapped at last by a giant sun, they cannot escape and from their stubborn material the mind forges a masterpiece of literature, of philosophy or music. From such fleeting, fragmentary themes are the Symphonies of Sibelius built – perhaps, with the Theory of Relativity and the conquest of space, the greatest achievements of the century before the year 2000.

Even within the limits set by logic, the artist need not starve for lack of material. We may laugh at Fearn, but we must admire the magnificent, if undisciplined, fertility of his mind. In a less ephemeral field, Stapledon has produced enough themes to keep a generation of science fiction authors busy. There is no reason why others should not do the same; few of the really fundamental ideas of fantasy have been properly exploited. Who has ever, in any story, dared to show the true meaning of immortality, with its cessation of progress and evolution, and, above all, its inevitable destruction of Youth? Only Keller, and then more with sympathy than genius. And who has had the courage to point out that, with sufficient scientific powers, reincarnation is possible? What a story
that
would make!

All around us, in the commonest things we do, lie endless possibilities. So many things
might
happen, and don’t – but may some day. How odd it would be if someone to whom you were talking on the phone walked into the room and began a conversation with a colleague! Suppose that when you switched off the light last thing at night you found that it had never been on anyway? And what a shock it would be if you woke up to find yourself fast asleep! It would be quite as unsettling as meeting oneself in the street. I have often wondered, too, what would happen if one adopted the extreme solipsist attitude and decided that nothing existed outside one’s mind. An attempt to put such a theory into practice would be extremely interesting. Whether any forces at our command could effect a devoted adherent to this philosophy is doubtful. He could always stop thinking of us, and then we should be in a mess.