The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (24 page)

At first it seemed only the faintest of glimmers, and when he was sure of its existence he noticed that Trilorne had already disappeared. But he felt more confidence now, and as he moved onward, the returning light did something to subdue his fears.

When he saw that he was indeed approaching another sun, when he could tell beyond any doubt that it was expanding as a moment ago he had seen Trilorne contract, he forced all amazement down into the depths of his mind. He would only observe and record: later there would be time to understand these things. That his world might possess two suns, one shining upon it from either side, was not, after all, beyond imagination.

Now at last he could see, faintly through the darkness, the ebon line that marked the Wall’s other rim. Soon he would be the first man in thousands of years, perhaps in eternity, to look upon the lands that it had sundered from his world. Would they be as fair as his own, and would there be people there whom he would be glad to greet?

But that they would be waiting, and in such a way, was more than he had dreamed.

Grayle stretched his hand out toward the cabinet beside him and fumbled for a large sheet of paper that was lying upon it. Brayldon watched him in silence, and the old man continued.

‘How often we have all heard arguments about the size of the universe, and whether it has any boundaries! We can imagine no ending to space, yet our minds rebel at the idea of infinity. Some philosophers have imagined that space is limited by curvature in a higher dimension—I suppose you know the theory. It may be true of other universes, if they exist, but for ours the answer is more subtle.

‘
Along the line of the Wall, Brayldon, our universe comes to an end—and yet does not
. There was no boundary, nothing to stop one going onward before the Wall was built. The Wall itself is merely a man-made barrier, sharing the properties of the space in which it lies. Those properties were always there, and the Wall added nothing to them.’

He held the sheet of paper toward Brayldon and slowly rotated it.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘is a plain sheet. It has, of course, two sides.
Can you imagine one that has not
?’

Brayldon stared at him in amazement.

‘That’s impossible—ridiculous!’

‘But is it?’ said Grayle softly. He reached toward the cabinet again and his fingers groped in its recesses. Then he drew out a long, flexible strip of paper and turned vacant eyes to the silently waiting Brayldon.

‘We cannot match the intellects of the First Dynasty, but what their minds could grasp directly we can approach by analogy. This simple trick, which seems so trivial, may help you to glimpse the truth.’

He ran his fingers along the paper strip, then joined the two ends together to make a circular loop.

‘Here I have a shape which is perfectly familiar to you—the section of a cylinder. I run my finger around the inside, so—and now along the outside. The two surfaces are quite distinct: you can go from one to the other only by moving through the thickness of the strip. Do you agree?’

‘Of course,’ said Brayldon, still puzzled. ‘But what does it prove?’

‘Nothing,’ said Grayle. ‘But now watch—’

This sun, Shervane thought, was Trilorne’s identical twin. The darkness had now lifted completely, and there was no longer the sensation, which he would not try to understand, of walking across an infinite plain.

He was moving slowly now, for he had no desire to come too suddenly upon that vertiginous precipice. In a little while he could see a distant horizon of low hills, as bare and lifeless as those he had left behind him. This did not disappoint him unduly, for the first glimpse of his own land would be no more attractive than this.

So he walked on: and when presently an icy hand fastened itself upon his heart, he did not pause as a man of lesser courage would have done. Without flinching, he watched that shockingly familiar landscape rise around him, until he could see the plain from which his journey had started, and the great stairway itself, and at last Brayldon’s anxious, waiting face.

Again Grayle brought the two ends of the strip together, but now he had given it a half-twist so that the band was kinked. He held it out to Brayldon.

‘Run your finger around it now,’ he said quietly.

Brayldon did not do so: he could see the old man’s meaning.

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘You no longer have two separate surfaces. It now forms a single continuous sheet—
a one-sided surface
—something that at first sight seems utterly impossible.’

‘Yes,’ replied Grayle very softly. ‘I thought you would understand.
A one-sided surface
. Perhaps you realise now why this symbol of the twisted loop is so common in the ancient religions, though its meaning has been completely lost. Of course, it is no more than a crude and simple analogy—an example in two dimensions of what must really occur in three. But it is as near as our minds can ever get to the truth.’

There was a long, brooding silence. Then Grayle sighed deeply and turned to Brayldon as if he could still see his face.

‘Why did you come back before Shervane?’ he asked, though he knew the answer well enough.

‘We had to do it,’ said Brayldon sadly, ‘but I did not wish to see my work destroyed.’

Grayle nodded in sympathy.

‘I understand,’ he said.

Shervane ran his eye up the long flight of steps on which no feet would ever tread again. He felt few regrets: he had striven, and no one could have done more. Such victory as was possible had been his.

Slowly he raised his hand and gave the signal. The Wall swallowed the explosion as it had absorbed all other sounds, but the unhurried grace with which the long tiers of masonry curtsied and fell was something he would remember all his life. For a moment he had a sudden, inexpressibly poignant vision of another stairway, watched by another Shervane, falling in identical ruins on the far side of the Wall.

But that, he realised, was a foolish thought: for none knew better than he that the Wall possessed no other side.

The Lion of Comarre

First published in
Thrilling Wonder Stories
, August 1949

Collected in
The Lion of Comarre and Against the Fall of Night

‘The Lion of Comarre’ was written at around the same time as
Against the Fall of Night
and shares the emotions of the longer work. Both involve a search, or quest, for unknown and mysterious goals. In each case, the real
objectives
are wonder and magic, rather than any material gain. And in each case, the hero is a young man dissatisfied with his environment.

There are many such today, with good reason. To them I dedicate these words, written before they were born.

CHAPTER ONE

Revolt

Toward the close of the twenty-sixth century the great tide of Science had at last begun to ebb. The long series of inventions that had shaped and moulded the world for nearly a thousand years was coming to its end. Everything had been discovered. One by one, all the great dreams of the past had become reality.

Civilisation was completely mechanised—yet machinery had almost vanished. Hidden in the walls of the cities or buried far underground, the perfect machines bore the burden of the world. Silently, unobtrusively, the robots attended to their masters’ needs, doing their work so well that their presence seemed as natural as the dawn.

There was still much to learn in the realm of pure science, and the astronomers, now that they were no longer bound to Earth, had work enough for a thousand years to come. But the physical sciences and the arts they nourished had ceased to be the chief preoccupation of the race. By the year 2600 the finest human minds were no longer to be found in the laboratories.

The men whose names meant most to the world were the artists and philosophers, the lawgivers and statesmen. The engineers and the great inventors belonged to the past. Like the men who had once ministered to long-vanished diseases, they had done their work so well that they were no longer required.

Five hundred years were to pass before the pendulum swung back again.

The view from the studio was breath-taking, for the long, curving room was over two miles from the base of Central Tower. The five other giant buildings of the city clustered below, their metal walls gleaming with all the colours of the spectrum as they caught the rays of the morning sun. Lower still, the checkerboard fields of the automatic farms stretched away until they were lost in the mists of the horizon. But for once, the beauty of the scene was wasted on Richard Peyton II as he paced angrily among the great blocks of synthetic marble that were the raw materials of his art.

The huge, gorgeously coloured masses of artificial rock completely dominated the studio. Most of them were roughly hewn cubes, but some were beginning to assume the shapes of animals, human beings, and abstract solids that no geometrician would have dared to give a name. Sitting awkwardly on a ten-ton block of diamond—the largest ever synthesised—the artist’s son was regarding his famous parent with an unfriendly expression.

‘I don’t think I’d mind so much,’ Richard Peyton II remarked peevishly, ‘if you were content to do nothing, so long as you did it gracefully. Certain people excel at that, and on the whole they make the world more interesting. But why you should want to make a life study of engineering is more than I can imagine.

‘Yes, I know we let you take technology as your main subject, but we never thought you were so serious about it. When I was your age I had a passion for botany—but I never made it my main interest in life. Has Professor Chandras Ling been giving you ideas?’

Richard Peyton III blushed.

‘Why shouldn’t he? I know what my vocation is, and he agrees with me. You’ve read his report.’

The artist waved several sheets of paper in the air, holding them between thumb and forefinger like some unpleasant insect.

‘I have,’ he said grimly. ‘“Shows very unusual mechanical ability—has done original work in subelectronic research,” et cetera, et cetera. Good heavens, I thought the human race had outgrown those toys centuries ago! Do you want to be a mechanic, first class, and go around attending to disabled robots? That’s hardly a job for a boy of mine, not to mention the grandson of a World Councillor.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t keep bringing Grandfather into this,’ said Richard Peyton III with mounting annoyance. ‘The fact that he was a statesman didn’t prevent your becoming an artist. So why should you expect me to be either?’

The older man’s spectacular golden beard began to bristle ominously.

‘I don’t care what you do as long as it’s something we can be proud of. But why this craze for gadgets? We’ve got all the machines we need. The robot was perfected five hundred years ago: spaceships haven’t changed for at least that time; I believe our present communications system is nearly eight hundred years old. So why change what’s already perfect?’

‘That’s special pleading with a vengeance!’ the young man replied. ‘Fancy an artist saying that anything’s perfect! Father, I’m ashamed of you!’

‘Don’t split hairs. You know perfectly well what I mean. Our ancestors designed machines that provide us with everything we need No doubt some of them might be a few per cent more efficient. But why worry? Can you mention a single important invention that the world lacks today?’

Richard Peyton III sighed.

‘Listen, Father,’ he said patiently. ‘I’ve been studying history as well as engineering. About twelve centuries ago there were people who said that everything had been invented—and
that
was before the coming of electricity, let alone flying and astronautics. They just didn’t look far enough ahead—their minds were rooted in the present.

‘The same thing’s happening today. For five hundred years the world’s been living on the brains of the past. I’m prepared to admit that some lines of development have come to an end, but there are dozens of others that haven’t even begun.

‘Technically the world has stagnated. It’s not a dark age, because we haven’t forgotten anything. But we’re marking time. Look at space travel. Nine hundred years ago we reached Pluto, and where are we now? Still at Pluto! When are we going to cross interstellar space?’