Childhood's End

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Mr Stormgren,” the intruder began, “I’m very sorry to bother you, but I wonder if you’d care to comment on something we’ve just heard about the Overlords.”

  Stormgren frowned slightly. After all these years, he still shared Karellen’s dislike for that word.

  “I do not think,” he said, “that I can add a great deal to what has been written elsewhere.”

  The reporter was watching him with a curious intentness.

  “I thought that you might. A rather strange story has just come to our notice. It seems that, nearly thirty years ago, one of the Science Bureau’s technicians made some remarkable equipment for you. We wondered if you could tell us anything about it.”

  For a moment Stormgren was silent, his mind going back into the past. He was not surprised that the secret had been discovered. Indeed, it was surprising that it had been kept so long.

  He rose to his feet and began to walk back along the jetty, the reporter following a few paces behind.

  “The story,” he said, “contains a certain amount of truth. On my last visit to Karellen’s ship I took some apparatus with me, in the hope that I might be able to see the Supervisor. It was rather a foolish thing to do, but — well, I was only sixty at the time.”

  He chuckled to himself and then continued.

  “It’s not much of a story to have brought you all this way. You see, it didn’t work.”

  “You saw nothing?”

  “No, nothing at all. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait — but after all, there are only twenty years to go!”

  Twenty years to go. Yes, Karellen had been right. By then the world would be ready, as it had not been when he had spoken that same lie to Duval thirty years ago.

  Karellen had trusted him, and Stormgren had not betrayed his faith. He was as sure as he could be of anything that the Supervisor had known his plan from the beginning, and had foreseen every moment of its final act.

  Why else had that enormous chair been already empty when the circle of light blazed upon it! In the same moment he had started to swing the beam, fearing that he was too late. The metal door, twice as high as a man, was closing swiftly when he first caught sight of it — closing swiftly, yet not quite swiftly enough.

  Yes, Karellen had trusted him, had not wished him to go down into the long evening of his life haunted by a mystery he could never solve. Karellen dared not defy the unknown powers above him (were they of that same race also?) but he had done all that he could. If he had disobeyed them, they could never prove it. It was the final proof, Stormgren knew, of Karellen’s affection for him. Though it might be the affection of a man for a devoted and intelligent dog, it was none the less sincere for that, and Stormgren’s life had given him few greater satisfactions.

  “We have had our failures.”

  Yes, Karellen, that was true; and were you the one who failed, before the dawn of human history? It must have been a failure indeed, thought Stormgren, for its echoes to roll down all the ages, to haunt the childhood of every race of man. Even in fifty years, could you overcome the power of all the myths and legends of the world?

  Yet Stormgren knew there would be no second failure.

  When the two races met again, the Overlords would have won the trust and friendship of mankind, and not even the shock of recognition could undo that work. They would go together into the future, and the unknown tragedy that must have darkened the past would be lost forever down the dim corridors of prehistoric time.

  And Stormgren hoped that when Karellen was free to walk once more on Earth, he would one day come to these northern forests, and stand beside the grave of the first man ever to be his friend.

  II. THE GOLDEN AGE

  Chapter 5

  “This is the day!” whispered the radios in a hundred tongues. “This is the day!” said the headlines of a thousand newspapers. “This is the day!” thought the cameramen as they checked and rechecked the equipment gathered round the vast empty space upon which Karellen’s ship would be descending.

  There was only the single ship now, hanging above New York. Indeed, as the world had just discovered, the ships above Man’s other cities had never existed. The day before, the great fleet of the Overlords had dissolved into nothingness, fading like mist beneath the morning dew.

  The supply ships, coming and going far out in space, had been real enough; but the silver clouds that had hung for a lifetime above almost all the capitals of Earth had been an illusion. How it had been done, no one could tell, but it seemed that every one of those ships had been nothing more than an image of Karellen’s own vessel. Yet it had been far more than a matter of playing with light, for radar had also been deceived, and there were still men alive who swore that they had heard the shriek of torn air as the fleet came in through the skies of Earth.

  It was not important; all that mattered was that Karellen no longer felt the need for this display of force. He had thrown away his psychological weapons.

  “The ship is moving!” came the word, flashed instantly to every corner of the planet. “It is heading westward!”

  At less than a thousand kilometres an hour, falling slowly down from the empty heights of the stratosphere, the ship moved out to the great plains and to its second rendezvous with history. It settled down obediently before the waiting cameras and the packed thousands of spectators, so few of who could see as much as the millions gathered round their TV sets.

  The ground should have cracked and trembled beneath that tremendous weight, but the vessel was still in the grip of whatever forces drove it among the stars. It kissed the earth as gently as a falling snowflake.

  The curving wall twenty metres above the ground seemed to flow and shimmer; where there had been a smooth and shining surface, a great opening had appeared. Nothing was visible within it, even to the questing eyes of the camera. It was as dark and shadowed as the entrance to a cave.

  Out of the orifice, a wide, glittering gangway extruded itself and drove purposefully towards the ground. It seemed a solid sheet of metal with hand-rails along either side. There were no steps; it was steep and smooth as a toboggan slide and, one would have thought, equally impossible to ascend or descend in any ordinary manner.

  The world was watching that dark portal, within which nothing had yet stirred. Then the seldom-heard yet unforgettable voice of Karellen floated softly down from some hidden source. His message could scarcely have been more unexpected. “There are some children by the foot of the gangway. I would like two of them to come up and meet me.”

  There was silence for a moment. Then a boy and a girl broke from the crowd and walked, with complete lack of self-consciousness, towards the gangway and into history. Others followed, but stopped when Karellen’s chuckle came from the ship.

  “Two will be enough.”

  Eagerly anticipating the adventure, the children — they could not have been more than six years old — jumped on to the metal slide. Then the first miracle happened.

  Waving cheerfully to the crowds beneath, and to their anxious parents — who, too late, had probably remembered the legend of the Pied Piper — the children began swiftly ascending the steep slope. Yet their legs were motionless, and soon it was clear also that their bodies were tilted at right angles to that peculiar gangway. It possessed a private gravity of its own, one which could ignore that of Earth. The children were still enjoying this novel experience, and wondering what was drawing them upwards, when they disappeared into the ship.

  A vast silence lay over the whole world for the space of twenty seconds — though, afterwards, no one could believe that the time had been so short. Then the darkness of the great opening seemed to move forward, and Karellen came forth into the sunlight. The boy was sitting on his left arm, the girl on his right. They were both too busy playing with Karellen’s wings to take any notice of the watching multitude.

  It was a tribute to the Overlords’ psychology, and to their careful years of preparation, that only a few people fainted. Yet there co
uld have been fewer still, anywhere in the world, who did not feel the ancient terror brush for one awful instant against their minds before reason banished it forever.

  There was no mistake. The leathery wings, the little horns, the barbed tail — all were there. The most terrible of all legends had come to life, out of the unknown past. Yet now it stood smiling, in ebon majesty, with the sunlight gleaming upon its tremendous body, and with a human child resting trustfully on either arm.

  Chapter 6

  Fifty years is ample time in which to change a world and its people almost beyond recognition. All that is required for the task are a sound knowledge of social engineering, a clear sight of the intended goal — and power.

  These things the Overlords possessed. Though their goal was hidden, their knowledge was obvious — and so was their power.

  That power took many forms, few of them realised by the peoples whose destinies the Overlords now ruled. The might enshrined in their great ships had been clear enough for every eye to see. But behind that display of sleeping force were other and much subtler weapons.

  “All political problems,” Karellen had once told Stormgren, “can be solved by the correct application of power.”

  “That sounds a rather cynical remark,” Stormgren had replied doubtfully. “It’s a little too much like ‘Might is Right’. In our own past, the use of power has been notably unsuccessful in solving anything.”

  “The operative word is correct. You have never possessed real power, or the knowledge necessary to apply it. As in all problems, there are efficient and inefficient approaches. Suppose, for example, that one of your nations, led by some fanatical ruler, tried to revolt against me. The highly inefficient answer to such a threat would be some billions of horsepower in the shape of atomic bombs. If I used enough bombs, the solution would be complete and final. It would also, as I remarked, be inefficient — even if it possessed no other defects.”

  “And the efficient solution?”

  “That requires about as much power as a small radio transmitter — and rather similar skills to operate. For it’s the application of the power, not its amount, that matters. How long do you think Hitler’s career as dictator of Germany would have lasted, if wherever he went a voice was talking quietly in his ear? Or if a steady musical note, loud enough to drown all other sounds and to prevent sleep, filled his brain night and day? Nothing brutal, you appreciate. Yet, in the final analysis, just as irresistible as a tritium bomb.”

  “I see,” said Stormgren; “and there would be no place to hide?”

  “No place where I could not send my — ah — devices if I felt sufficiently strongly about it. And that is why I shall never have to use really drastic methods to maintain my position.”

  The great ships, then, had never been more than symbols, and now the world knew that all save one had been phantoms.

  Yet, by their mere presence, they had changed the history of Earth. Now their task was done, and their achievement lingered behind them to go echoing down the centuries.

  Karellen’s calculations had been accurate. The shock of revulsion had passed swiftly, though there were many who prided themselves on their freedom from superstition yet would never be able to face one of the Overlords. There was something strange here, something beyond all reason or logic.

  In the Middle Ages, people believed in the devil and feared him. But this was the twenty-first century; could it be that, after all, there was such a thing as racial memory?

  It was, of course, universally assumed that the Overlords, or beings of the same species, had come into violent conflict with ancient man. The meeting must have lain in the remote past, for it had left no traces in recorded history. Here was another puzzle, and Karellen would give no help in its solution.

  The Overlords, though they had now shown themselves to man, seldom left their one remaining ship. Perhaps they found it physically uncomfortable on Earth, for their size, and the existence of their wings, indicated that they came from a world of much lower gravity. They were never seen without a belt adorned with complex mechanisms which, it was generally believed, controlled their weight and enabled them to communicate with each other. Direct sunlight was painful to them, and they never stayed in it for more than a few seconds. When they had to go into the open for any length of time, they wore dark glasses which gave them a somewhat incongruous appearance. Though they seemed able to breathe terrestrial air, they sometimes carried small cylinders of gas from which they refreshed themselves occasionally.

  Perhaps these purely physical problems accounted for their aloofness. Only a small fraction of the human race had ever actually met an Overlord in the flesh, and no one could guess how many of them were aboard Karellen’s ship. No more than five had ever been seen together at one time, but there might be hundreds, even thousands of them aboard that tremendous vessel.

  In many ways, the appearance of the Overlords had raised more problems than it had solved. Their origin was still unknown, their biology a source of endless speculation. On many matters they would give information freely, but on others their behaviour could only be described as secretive. On the whole, however, this did not annoy anyone except the scientists. The average man, though he might prefer not to meet the Overlords, was grateful to them for what they had done to his world.

  By the standards of all earlier ages, it was Utopia. Ignorance, disease, poverty and fear had virtually ceased to exist. The memory of war was fading into the past as a nightmare vanishes with the dawn; soon it would lie outside the experience of all living men.

  With the energies of mankind directed into constructive channels, the face of the world had been remade. It was, almost literally, a new world. The cities that had been good enough for earlier generations had been rebuilt — or deserted and left as museum specimens when they had ceased to serve any useful purpose. Many cities had already been abandoned in this manner, for the whole pattern of industry and commerce had changed completely. Production had become largely automatic; the robot factories poured forth consumer goods in such unending streams that all the ordinary necessities of life were virtually free. Men worked for the sake of the luxuries they desired; or they did not work at all.

  It was One World. The old names of the old countries were still used, but they were no more than convenient postal divisions. There was no one on earth who could not speak English, who could not read, who was not within range of a television set, who could not visit the other side of the planet within twenty-four hours.

  Crime had practically vanished. It had become both unnecessary and impossible. When no one lacks anything, there is no point in stealing. Moreover, all potential criminals knew that there could be no escape from the surveillance of the Overlords. In the early days of their rule, they had intervened so effectively on behalf of law and order that the lesson had never been forgotten.

  Crimes of passion, though not quite extinct, were almost unheard of. Now that so many of its psychological problems had been removed, humanity was far saner and less irrational. And what earlier ages would have called vice was now no more than eccentricity — or, at the worst, bad manners.

  One of the most noticeable changes had been a slowing-down of the mad tempo that had so characterised the twentieth century. Life was more leisurely than it had been for generations. It therefore had less zest for the few, but more tranquillity for the many. Western man had relearned — what the rest of the world had never forgotten — that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth.

  Whatever problems the future might bring, time did not yet hang heavy on humanity’s hands. Education was now much more thorough and much more protracted. Few people left college before twenty — and that was merely the first stage, since they normally returned again at twenty-five for at least three more years, after travel and experience had broadened their minds. Even then, they would probably take refresher courses at intervals for the remainder of their lives in the subjects that part
icularly interested them.

  This extension of human apprenticeship so far past the beginning of physical maturity had given rise to many social changes. Some of these had been necessary for generations, but earlier periods had refused to face the challenge — or had pretended that it did not exist. In particular, the pattern of sexual mores — insofar as there had ever been one pattern — had altered radically. It had been virtually shattered by two inventions, which were, ironically enough, of purely human origin and owed nothing to the Overlords.

  The first was a completely reliable oral contraceptive; the second was an equally infallible method — as certain as fingerprinting, and based on a very detailed analysis of the blood — of identifying the father of any child. The effect of these two inventions upon human society could only be described as devastating, and they had swept away the last remnants of the Puritan aberration.

  Another great change was the extreme mobility of the new society. Thanks to the perfection of air transport, everyone was free to go anywhere at a moment’s notice. There was more room in the skies than there had ever been on the roads, and the twenty-first century had repeated, on a larger scale, the great American achievement of putting a nation on wheels.

  It had given wings to the world.

  Though not literally. The ordinary private flyer or aircar had no wings at all, or indeed any visible control surfaces.

  Even the clumsy rotor blades of the old helicopters had been banished. Yet Man had not discovered anti-gravity; only the Overlords possessed that ultimate secret. His aircars were propelled by forces which the Wright brothers would have understood. Jet reaction, used both directly and in the more subtle form of boundary layer control, drove his flyers forward and held them in the air. As no laws or edicts of the Overlords could have done, the ubiquitous little aircars had washed away the last barriers between the different tribes of mankind.