Tales From Planet Earth

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “I came back each day, when I could spare the time, and by the end of the week we were firm friends. It may surprise you that I was able to conceal these visits from my colleagues, but the island was quite large and we each did a lot of exploring. I felt somehow that Professor Takato was my private property, and did not wish to expose him to the curiosity of my companions. They were rather uncouth characters—graduates of some provincial university like Oxford or Cambridge.

  “I’m glad to say that I was able to give the Professor a certain amount of assistance, fixing his radio and lining up some of his electronic gear. He used radioactive tracers a good deal, to follow individual termites around. He’d been tracking one with a Geiger counter when I first met him, in fact.

  “Four or five days after we’d met, his counters started to go haywire, and the equipment we’d set up began to reel in its recordings. Takato guessed what had happened; he’d never asked me exactly what I was doing on the islands, but I think he knew. When I greeted him he switched on his counters and let me listen to the roar of radiation. There had been some radioactive fall-out—not enough to be dangerous, but sufficient to bring the background ’way up.

  “ ‘I think,’ he said softly, ‘that you physicists are playing with your toys again. And very big ones, this time.’

  “ ‘I’m afraid you’re right,’ I answered. We wouldn’t be sure until the readings had been analyzed, but it looked as if Teller and his team had started the hydrogen reaction. ‘Before long, we’ll be able to make the first A-bombs look like damp squibs.’

  “ ‘My family,’ said Professor Takato, without any emotion, ‘was at Nagasaki.’

  “There wasn’t a great deal I could say to that, and I was glad when he went on to add: ‘Have you ever wondered who will take over when we are finished?’

  “ ‘Your termites?’ I said, half facetiously. He seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then he said quietly, ‘Come with me; I have not shown you everything.’

  “We walked over to a corner of the lab where some equipment lay concealed beneath dust-sheets, and the Professor uncovered a rather curious piece of apparatus. At first sight it looked like one of the manipulators used for the remote handling of dangerously radioactive materials. There were handgrips that conveyed movements through rods and levers, but everything seemed to focus on a small box a few inches on a side. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  “ ‘It’s a micromanipulator. The French developed them for biological work. There aren’t many around yet.’

  “Then I remembered. These were devices with which, by the use of suitable reduction gearing, one could carry out the most incredibly delicate operations. You moved your finger an inch—and the tool you were controlling moved a thousandth of an inch. The French scientists who had developed this technique had built tiny forges on which they could construct minute scalpels and tweezers from fused glass. Working entirely through microscopes, they had been able to dissect individual cells. Removing an appendix from a termite (in the highly doubtful event of the insect possessing one) would be child’s play with such an instrument.

  “ ‘I am not very skilled at using the manipulator,’ confessed Takato. ‘One of my assistants does all the work with it. I have shown no one else this, but you have been very helpful. Come with me, please.’

  “We went out into the open, and walked past the avenues of tall, cement-hard mounds. They were not all of the same architectural design, for there are many different kinds of termites—some, indeed, don’t build mounds at all. I felt rather like a giant walking through Manhattan, for these were skyscrapers, each with its own teeming population.

  “There was a small metal (not wooden—the termites would soon have fixed that!) hut beside one of the mounds, and as we entered it the glare of sunlight was banished. The Professor threw a switch, and a faint red glow enabled me to see various types of optical equipment.

  “ ‘They hate light,’ he said, ‘so it’s a great problem observing them. We solved it by using infra-red. This is an image-converter of the type that was used in the war for operations at night. You know about them?’

  “ ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Snipers had them fixed on their rifles so that they could go sharp-shooting in the dark. Very ingenious things—I’m glad you’ve found a civilized use for them.’

  “It was a long time before Professor Takato found what he wanted. He seemed to be steering some kind of periscope arrangement, probing through the corridors of the termite city. Then he said: ‘Quick—before they’ve gone!’

  “I moved over and took his position. It was a second or so before my eye focused properly, and longer still before I understood the scale of the picture I was seeing. Then I saw six termites, greatly enlarged, moving rather rapidly across the field of vision. They were travelling in a group, like the huskies forming a dog-team. And that was a very good analogy, because they were towing a sledge . . .

  “I was so astonished that I never even noticed what kind of load they were moving. When they had vanished from sight, I turned to Professor Takato. My eyes had now grown accustomed to the faint red glow, and I could see him quite well.

  “ ‘So that’s the sort of tool you’ve been building with your micromanipulator!’ I said. ‘It’s amazing—I’d never have believed it.’

  “ ‘But that is nothing,’ replied the Professor. ‘Performing fleas will pull a cart around. I haven’t told you what is so important. We only made a few of those sledges. The one you saw they constructed themselves.’

  “He let that sink in: it took some time. Then he continued quietly, but with a kind of controlled enthusiasm in his voice: ‘Remember that the termites, as individuals have virtually no intelligence. But the colony as a whole is a very high type of organism—and an immortal one, barring accidents. It froze in its present instinctive pattern millions of years before Man was born, and by itself it can never escape from its present sterile perfection. It has reached a dead-end—because it has no tools, no effective way of controlling nature. I have given it the lever, to increase its power, and now the sledge, to improve its efficiency. I have thought of the wheel, but it is best to let that wait for a later stage—it would not be very useful now. The results have exceeded my expectations. I started with this termitary alone—but now they all have the same tools. They have taught each other, and that proves they can cooperate. True, they have wars—but not when there is enough food for all, as there is here.

  “ ‘But you cannot judge the termitary by human standards. What I hope to do is to jolt its rigid, frozen culture—to knock it out of the groove in which it has stuck for so many millions of years. I will give it more tools, more new techniques—and before I die, I hope to see it beginning to invent things for itself.’

  “ ‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked, for I knew there was more than mere scientific curiosity here.

  “ ‘Because I do not believe that Man will survive, yet I hope to preserve some of the things he has discovered. If he is to be a dead-end, I think that another race should be given a helping hand. Do you know why I chose this island? It was so that my experiment should remain isolated. My supertermite, if it ever evolves, will have to remain here until it has reached a very high level of attainment. Until it can cross the Pacific, in fact . . .

  “ ‘There is another possibilty. Man has no rival on this planet. I think it may do him good to have one. It may be his salvation.’

  “I could think of nothing to say: this glimpse of the Professor’s dreams was so overwhelming—and yet, in view of what I had just seen, so convincing. For I knew that Professor Takato was not mad. He was a visionary, and there was a sublime detachment about his outlook, but it was based on a secure foundation of scientific achievement.

  “And it was not that he was hostile to mankind: he was sorry for it. He simply believed that humanity had shot its bolt, and wished to save something from the wreckage. I could not feel it in my heart to blame him.

  “We must have been in that little hut for
a long time, exploring possible futures. I remember suggesting that perhaps there might be some kind of mutual understanding, since two cultures so utterly dissimilar as Man and Termite need have no cause for conflict. But I couldn’t really believe this, and if a contest comes, I’m not certain who will win. For what use would man’s weapons be against an intelligent enemy who could lay waste all the wheat fields and all the rice crops in the world?

  “When we came out into the open once more, it was almost dusk. It was then that the Professor made his final revelation.

  “ ‘In a few weeks,’ he said, ‘I am going to take the biggest step of all.’

  “ ‘And what is that?’ I asked.

  “ ‘Cannot you guess? I am going to give them fire.’

  “Those words did something to my spine. I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the oncoming night. The glorious sunset that was taking place beyond the palms seemed symbolic—and suddenly I realized that the symbolism was even deeper than I had thought.

  “That sunset was one of the most beautiful I had ever seen, and it was partly of man’s making. Up there in the stratosphere, the dust of an island that had died this day was encircling the earth. My race had taken a great step forward; but did it matter now?

  “ ‘I am going to give them fire.’ Somehow, I never doubted that the Professor would succeed. And when he had done so, the forces that my own race had just unleashed would not save it . . .

  “The flying boat came to collect us the next day, and I did not see Takato again. He is still there, and I think he is the most important man in the world. While our politicians wrangle, he is making us obsolete.

  “Do you think that someone ought to stop him? There may still be time. I’ve often thought about it, but I’ve never been able to think of a really convincing reason why I should interfere. Once or twice I nearly made up my mind, but then I’d pick up the newspaper and see the headlines.

  “I think we should let them have the chance. I don’t see how they could make a worse job of it than we’ve done.”

  Saturn Rising

  Introduction

  This story brings back vivid memories of my own very first glimpse of the planet’s rings, while I was evacuated with my other colleagues in His Majesty’s Exchequer and Audit Department to Colwyn Bay, North Wales, during the early months of World War Two.

  I had bought an old-fashioned telescope of about two inches’ aperture from a naval cadet at a local training establishment, who presumably was short of money (not that I was particularly affluent on my Civil Service salary of about five pounds a week). The rather battered instrument consisted of one brass tube sliding inside another. I removed the inner tube (containing the erecting lenses and the eye-piece) and replaced it with a single short-focus lens, increasing the magnifying power considerably. It was through this crude device that I first saw Saturn and its rings, and like every observer since Galileo, was entranced by one of the most breath-taking spectacles in the sky. Little did I imagine, when I wrote this story in 1960, that within less than two decades the fantastically successful Voyager Missions to the outer Solar System would reveal that the rings of Saturn were far more complex and beautiful than anyone had ever dreamed.

  The story has, of course, been dated by the scientific discoveries of the last three decades—in particular, we now know that Titan does not have a predominantly methane atmosphere, but one which is mostly nitrogen. (And there goes the main thesis of my novel Imperial Earth, which is also set on Titan. Ah, well, you can’t win ’em all: that story now takes place in a slightly parallel Universe; see the note on “The Wall of Darkness.”)

  There is another error which I might have corrected at the time. Even if you could observe Saturn from the surface of Titan (which atmospheric haze will probably prevent), you’d never see it “rising.” Almost certainly, Titan, like our own Moon, has had its rotation tidally braked, so that it always keeps the same face turned towards its primary. So Saturn remains fixed in Titan’s sky, just as the Earth does in the Moon’s.

  No problem—we’ll build our hotel in orbit, which is a much better idea anway. From Titan the rings will always appear edge-on, so that they’ll merely be a narrow band of light. Only by viewing them from an inclined orbit can their full glory be appreciated.

  Moreover, I suspect that conditions on the surface of Titan will make Antarctica look like Hawaii.

  Yes, that’s perfectly true. I met Morris Perlman when I was about twenty-eight. I met thousands of people in those days, from presidents downward.

  When we got back from Saturn, everybody wanted to see us, and about half the crew took off on lecture tours. I’ve always enjoyed talking (don’t say you haven’t noticed it), but some of my colleagues said they’d rather go to Pluto than face another audience. Some of them did.

  My beat was the Midwest, and the first time I ran into Mr. Perlman—no one ever called him anything else, certainly never “Morris”—was in Chicago. The agency always booked me into good, but not too luxurious hotels. That suited me; I liked to stay in places where I could come and go as I pleased without running a gauntlet of liveried flunkies, and where I could wear anything within reason without being made to feel a tramp. I see you’re grinning: well, I was only a lad then and a lot of things have changed . . .

  It was a long time ago now, but I must have been lecturing at the University. At any rate, I remember being disappointed because they couldn’t show me the place where Fermi started the first atomic pile—they said that the building had been pulled down forty years before, and there was only a plaque to mark the spot. I stood looking at it for a while, thinking of all that had happened since that far-off day in 1942. I’d been born, for one thing; and atomic power had taken me out to Saturn and back. That was probably something that Fermi and Co. never thought of, when they built their primitive latticework of uranium and graphite.

  I was having breakfast in the coffee shop when a slightly built, middle-aged man dropped into the seat on the other side of the table. He nodded a polite “Good morning,” then gave a start of surprise as he recognized me. (Of course, he’d planned the encounter, but I didn’t know it at the time.)

  “This is a pleasure!” he said. “I was at your lecture last night. How I envied you!”

  I gave a rather forced smile; I’m never very sociable at breakfast, and I’d learned to be on my guard against the cranks, bores, and enthusiasts who seemed to regard me as their legitimate prey. Mr. Perlman, however, was not a bore—though he was certainly an enthusiast, and I suppose you could call him a crank.

  He looked like any average, fairly prosperous businessman, and I assumed that he was a guest like myself. The fact that he had attended my lecture was not surprising; it had been a popular one, open to the public, and of course well advertised over press and radio.

  “Ever since I was a kid,” said my uninvited companion, “Saturn has fascinated me. I know exactly when and how it all started. I must have been about ten years old when I came across those wonderful paintings of Chesley Bonestell’s, showing the planet as it would look from its nine moons. I suppose you’ve seen them?”

  “Of course,” I answered. “Though they’re half a century old, no one’s beaten them yet. We had a couple aboard the Endeavour, pinned on the plotting table. I often used to look at the pictures and then compare them with the real thing.”

  “Then you know how I felt, back in the nineteen-fifties. I used to sit for hours trying to grasp the fact that this incredible object, with its silver rings spinning around it, wasn’t just some artist’s dream, but actually existed—that it was a world, in fact, ten times the size of Earth.

  “At that time I never imagined that I could see this wonderful thing for myself; I took it for granted that only the astronomers, with their giant telescopes, could ever look at such sights. But then, when I was about fifteen, I made another discovery—so exciting that I could hardly believe it.”

  “And what was that?” I asked. By now I’d beco
me reconciled to sharing breakfast; my companion seemed a harmless-enough character, and there was something quite endearing about his obvious enthusiasm.

  “I found that any fool could make a high-powered astronomical telescope in his own kitchen, for a few dollars and a couple of weeks’ work. It was a revelation: like thousands of other kids, I borrowed a copy of Dingalls’ Amateur Telescope Making from the public library and went ahead. Tell me—have you ever built a telescope of your own?”

  “No: I’m an engineer, not an astronomer. I wouldn’t know how to begin the job.”

  “It’s incredibly simple, if you follow the rules. You start with two disks of glass, about an inch thick. I got mine for fifty cents from a ship chandler’s; they were porthole glasses that were no use because they’d been warped around the edges. Then you cement one disk to some flat, firm surface—I used an old barrel, standing on end.

  “Next you have to buy several grades of emery powder, starting from coarse, gritty stuff and working down to the finest that’s made. You lay a pinch of the coarsest powder between the two disks, and start rubbing the upper one back and forth with regular strokes. As you do so, you slowly circle around the job.