The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (52 page)

Wondering if the whole thing was a practical joke, PC Hinks put the receiver down and quietly made his way to the cells. The three prisoners seemed to be engaged in friendly conversation, so he tiptoed away again. It would do them all good to have a chance to cool down. He rubbed his eye tenderly as he remembered what a battle it had been to get Mr Graham into the cell during the small hours of the morning.

That young man was now reasonably sober after the night’s celebrations, which he did not in the least regret. (It was, after all, quite an occasion when your degree came through and you found you’d got Honours when you’d barely expected a Pass.) But he began to fear that he was still under the influence as Danstor unfolded his tale and waited, not expected to be believed.

In these circumstances, thought Graham, the best thing to do was to behave as matter-of-factly as possible until the hallucinations got fed up and went away.

‘If you really have a spaceship in the hills,’ he remarked, ‘surely you can get in touch with it and ask someone to come and rescue you?’

‘We want to handle this ourselves,’ said Crysteel with dignity. ‘Besides, you don’t know our captain.’

They sounded very convincing, thought Graham. The whole story hung together remarkably well. And yet…

‘It’s a bit hard for me to believe that you can build interstellar spaceships, but can’t get out of a miserable village police station.’

Danstor looked at Crysteel, who shuffled uncomfortably.

‘We could get out easily enough,’ said the anthropologist. ‘But we don’t want to use violent means unless it’s absolutely essential. You’ve no idea of the trouble it causes, and the reports we might have to fill in. Besides, if we do get out, I suppose your Flying Squad would catch us before we got back to the ship.’

‘Not in Little Milton,’ grinned Graham. ‘Especially if we could get across to the “White Hart” without being stopped. My car is over there.’

‘Oh,’ said Danstor, his spirits suddenly reviving. He turned to his companion and a lively discussion followed. Then, very gingerly, he produced a small black cylinder from an inner pocket, handling it with much the same confidence as a nervous spinster holding a loaded gun for the first time. Simultaneously, Crysteel retired with some speed to the far corner of the cell.

It was at this precise moment that Graham knew, with a sudden icy certainty, that he was stone-sober and that the story he had been listening to was nothing less than the truth.

There was no fuss or bother, no flurry of electric sparks or coloured rays—but a section of the wall three feet across dissolved quietly and collapsed into a little pyramid of sand. The sunlight came streaming into the cell as, with a great sigh of relief, Danstor put his mysterious weapon away.

‘Well, come on,’ he urged Graham. ‘We’re waiting for you.’

There were no signs of pursuit, for PC Hinks was still arguing on the phone, and it would be some minutes yet before that bright young man returned to the cells and received the biggest shock of his official career. No one at the ‘White Hart’ was particularly surprised to see Graham again; they all knew where and how he had spent the night, and expressed hope that the local Bench would deal leniently with him when his case came up.

With grave misgivings, Crysteel and Danstor climbed into the back of the incredibly ramshackle Bentley which Graham affectionately addressed as ‘Rose’. But there was nothing wrong with the engine under the rusty bonnet and soon they were roaring out of Little Milton at fifty miles an hour. It was a striking demonstration of the relativity of speed, for Crysteel and Danstor, who had spent the last few years travelling tranquilly through space at several million miles a second, had never been so scared in their lives. When Crysteel had recovered his breath he pulled out his little portable transmitter and called the ship.

‘We’re on the way back,’ he shouted above the roar of the wind. ‘We’ve got a fairly intelligent human being with us. Expect us in—whoops!—I’m sorry—we just went over a bridge—about ten minutes. What was that? No, of course not. We didn’t have the slightest trouble. Everything went perfectly smoothly.
Goodbye
.’

Graham looked back only once to see how his passengers were faring. The sight was rather unsettling, for their ears and hair (which had not been glued on very firmly) had blown away and their real selves were beginning to emerge. Graham began to suspect, with some discomfort, that his new acquaintances also lacked noses. Oh well, one could grow used to anything with practice. He was going to have plenty of that in the years ahead.

The rest, of course, you all know; but the full story of the first landing on Earth, and of the peculiar circumstances under which Ambassador Graham became humanity’s representative to the universe at large, has never before been recounted. We extracted the main details, with a good deal of persuasion, from Crysteel and Danstor themselves, while we were working on the Department of Extraterrestrial affairs.

It was understandable, in view of their success on Earth, that they should have been selected by their superiors to make the first contact with our mysterious and secretive neighbours, the Martians. It is also understandable, in the light of the above evidence, that Crysteel and Danstor were so reluctant to embark on this later mission, and we are not really very surprised that nothing has ever been heard of them since.

The Road to the Sea

First published in
Two Complete Science-Adventure Books
, Spring 1951, as ‘Seeker of the Sphinx’

Collected in
Tales of Ten Worlds

I’m amused to see that I predicted not only the invention of ultra-portable music players, but also the fact that they would quickly become such a public menace they would be banned. The second part of this prophecy, alas, has not yet been fulfilled.

The first leaves of autumn were falling when Durven met his brother on the headland beside the Golden Sphinx. Leaving his flyer among the shrubs by the roadside, he walked to the brow of the hill and looked down upon the sea. A bitter wind was toiling across the moors, bearing the threat of early frost, but down in the valley Shastar the Beautiful was still warm and sheltered in its crescent of hills. Its empty quays lay dreaming in the pale, declining sunlight, the deep blue of the sea washing gently against their marble flanks. As he looked down once more into the hauntingly familiar streets and gardens of his youth, Durven felt his resolution failing. He was glad he was meeting Hannar here, a mile from the city, and not among the sights and sounds that would bring his childhood crowding back upon him.

Hannar was a small dot far down the slope, climbing in his old unhurried, leisurely fashion. Durven could have met him in a moment with the flyer, but he knew he would receive little thanks if he did. So he waited in the lee of the great Sphinx, sometimes walking briskly to and fro to keep warm. Once or twice he went to the head of the monster and stared up at the still face brooding upon the city and the sea. He remembered how as a child in the gardens of Shastar he had seen the crouching shape upon the sky line, and had wondered if it was alive.

Hannar looked no older than he had seemed at their last meeting, twenty years before. His hair was still dark and thick, and his face unwrinkled, for few things ever disturbed the tranquil life of Shastar and its people. It seemed bitterly unfair, and Durven, grey with the years of unrelenting toil, felt a quick spasm of envy stab through his brain.

Their greetings were brief, but not without warmth. Then Hannar walked over to the ship, lying in its bed of heather and crumpled gorse bushes. He rapped his stick upon the curving metal and turned to Durven.

‘It’s very small. Did it bring you all the way?’

‘No: only from the Moon. I came back from the Project in a liner a hundred times the size of this.’

‘And where is the Project—or don’t you want us to know?’

‘There’s no secret about it. We’re building the ships out in space beyond Saturn, where the sun’s gravitational gradient is almost flat and it needs little thrust to send them right out of the solar system.’

Hannar waved his stick toward the blue waters beneath them, the coloured marble of the little towers, and the wide streets with their slowly moving traffic.

‘Away from all this, out into the darkness and loneliness—in search of what?’

Durven’s lips tightened into a thin, determined line.

‘Remember,’ he said quietly, ‘I have already spent a lifetime away from Earth.’

‘And has it brought you happiness?’ continued Hannar remorselessly.

Durven was silent for a while.

‘It has brought me more than that,’ he replied at last. ‘I have used my powers to the utmost, and have tasted triumphs that you can never imagine. The day when the First Expedition returned to the solar system was worth a lifetime in Shastar.’

‘Do you think,’ asked Hannar, ‘that you will build fairer cities than this beneath those strange suns, when you have left our world forever?’

‘If we feel that impulse, yes. If not, we will build other things. But build we must; and what have your people created in the last hundred years?’

‘Because we have made no machines, because we have turned our backs upon the stars and are content with our own world, don’t think we have been completely idle. Here in Shastar we have evolved a way of life that I do not think has ever been surpassed. We have studied the art of living; ours is the first aristocracy in which there are no slaves. That is our achievement, by which history will judge us.’

‘I grant you this,’ replied Durven, ‘but never forget that your paradise was built by scientists who had to fight as we have done to make their dreams come true.’

‘They have not always succeeded. The planets defeated them once; why should the worlds of other suns be more hospitable?’

It was a fair question. After five hundred years, the memory of that first failure was still bitter. With what hopes and dreams had Man set out for the planets, in the closing years of the twentieth century—only to find them not merely barren and lifeless, but fiercely hostile! From the sullen fires of the Mercurian lava seas to Pluto’s creeping glaciers of solid nitrogen, there was nowhere that he could live unprotected beyond his own world; and to his own world, after a century of fruitless struggle, he had returned.

Yet the vision had not wholly died; when the planets had been abandoned, there were still some who dared to dream of the stars. Out of that dream had come at last the Transcendental Drive, the First Expedition—and now the heady wine of long-delayed success.

‘There are fifty solar-type stars within ten years’ flight of Earth,’ Durven replied, ‘and almost all of them have planets. We believe now that the possession of planets is almost as much a characteristic of a G-type star as its spectrum, though we don’t know why. So the search for worlds like Earth was bound to be successful in time; I don’t think that we were particularly lucky to find Eden so soon.’

‘Eden? Is that what you’ve called your new world?’

‘Yes; it seemed appropriate.’

‘What incurable romantics you scientists are! Perhaps the name’s too well chosen; all the life in that first Eden wasn’t friendly to Man, if you remember.’

Durven gave a bleak smile.

‘That, again, depends on one’s viewpoint,’ he replied. He pointed toward Shastar, where the first lights had begun to glimmer. ‘Unless our ancestors had eaten deeply from the Tree of Knowledge, you would never have had this.’

‘And what do you suppose will happen to it now?’ asked Hannar bitterly. ‘When you have opened the road to the stars, all the strength and vigour of the race will ebb away from Earth as from an open wound.’

‘I do not deny it. It has happened before, and it will happen again. Shastar will go the way of Babylon and Carthage and New York. The future is built on the rubble of the past; wisdom lies in facing that fact, not in fighting against it. I have loved Shastar as much as you have done—so much so that now, though I shall never see it again, I dare not go down once more into its streets. You ask me what will become of it, and I will tell you. What we are doing will merely hasten the end. Even twenty years ago, when I was last here, I felt my will being sapped by the aimless ritual of your lives. Soon it will be the same in all the cities of Earth, for every one of them apes Shastar. I think the Drive has come none too soon; perhaps even you would believe me if you had spoken to the men who have come back from the stars, and felt the blood stirring in your veins once more after all these centuries of sleep. For your world is dying, Hannar; what you have now you may hold for ages yet, but in the end it will slip from your fingers. The future belongs to us; we will leave you to your dreams. We also have dreamed, and now we go to make our dreams come true.’