The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Nothing to it, he thought. Train comes in, put your money in the turnstile, show your permit to the turnstile’s eye, get aboard and that-is-that. Unless the money is phony, or the pass is phony in which case the turnstile locks and all hell breaks loose. His money was just dandy, but the permit now—there hadn’t been any way to test it against a turnstile’s template, or time to do it if there had been a way. Was the probability of boarding two to one?

  The probability abruptly dropped to zero as a round little man flanked by two huge men entered the station.

  Commander Grinnel.

  The picture puzzle fell into a whole as the two plainclothesmen circulating in the station eyed Grinnel and nodded to him. The big one absent-mindedly made a gesture that was the start of a police salute.

  Grinnel was Maurice Regan—the Maurice Regan mysteriously unknown to Oliver, who knew the Chicago police. Grinnel was a bit of a lend-lease from the North American Navy, called in because of his unique knowledge of Charles Orsino and Lee Falcaro, their faces, voices and behavior. Grinnel was the expert in combing the city without any nonsense about rights and mouthpieces. Grinnel was the expert who could set up a military interior guard of the city. Grinnel was the specialist temporarily invested with the rank of a Regan so he could do his job.

  The round little man with the halo of hair walked briskly to the turnstile and there stood at a military parade rest with a look of resignation on his face.

  How hard on me it is, he seemed to be saying, that I have such dull damn duty. How hard that an officer of my brilliance must do sentry-go for every train to Syndic Territory.

  The slack-jawed youth who was Lee Falcaro looked at him over her Green Sheet and nodded before dipping into the Tia Juana past performances again. She knew.

  Passengers were beginning to line up at the turnstile, smoothing out their money and fiddling with their permits. In a minute he and Lee Falcaro would have to join the line or stand conspicuously on the emptying floor. The thing was dead for twenty-four hours now, until the next train—and then Grinnel headed across the floor looking very impersonal. The look of a man going to the men’s room. The station cops and Grinnel’s two bruisers drifted together at the turnstile and began to chat.

  Charles followed Grinnel, wearing the same impersonal look, and entered the room almost on his heels.

  Grinnel saw him in a wash-bowl mirror; simultaneously he half turned, opened his mouth to yell and whipped his hand into his coat. A single round-house right from Charles crunched into the soft side of his neck. He fell with his head twisted at an odd angle. Blood began to run from the corner of his mouth onto his shirt.

  “Remember Martha?” Charles whispered down at the body. “That was for murder.” He looked around the tiled room. There was a mop closet with the door ajar, and Grinnel’s flabby body fitted in it.

  Charles walked from the washroom to the line of passengers across the floor. It seemed to go on for miles. Lee Falcaro was no longer lounging against the past. He spotted her in line, still slack-jawed, still gaping over the magazine. The monorail began to sing shrilly with the vibration of the train braking a mile away, and the turnstile “unlocked” light went on.

  There was the usual number of fumblers, the usual number of “please unfold your currency” flashes. Lee carried through to the end with her slovenly pose. For her the sign said: “incorrect denominations.” Behind her a man snarled: “for Christ’s sake, kid, we’re all waiting on you!” The cops only half noticed; they were talking. When Charles got to the turnstile one of the cops was saying: “Maybe it’s something he ate. How’d you like somebody to barge in—”

  The rest was lost in the clicking of the turnstile that let him through.

  * * * *

  He settled in a very pneumatic chair as the train accelerated evenly to a speed of three hundred and fifty miles per hour. A sign in the car said that the next stop was Buffalo. And there was Lee, lurching up the aisle against the acceleration. She spotted him, tossed the Green Sheet in the Air and fell into his lap.

  “Disgusting!” snarled a man across the aisle. “Simply disgusting!”

  “You haven’t seen anything yet,” Lee told him, and kissed Charles on the mouth.

  The man choked: “I shall certainly report this to the authorities when we arrive in Buffalo!”

  “Mmm,” said Lee, preoccupied. “Do that, mister. Do that.”

  XXII

  “I didn’t like his reaction,” Charles told her in the anteroom of F. W. Taylor’s office. “I didn’t talk to him long on the phone, but I don’t like his reaction at all. He seemed to think I was exaggerating. Or all wet. Or a punk kid.”

  “I can assure him you’re not that,” Lee Falcaro said warmly. “Call on me any time.”

  He gave her a worried smile. The door opened then and they went in.

  Uncle Frank looked up. “We’d just about written you two off,” he said. “What’s it like?”

  “Bad,” Charles said. “Worse than anything you’ve imagined. There’s an underground, all right, and they are practicing assassination.”

  “Too bad,” the old man said. “We’ll have to shake up the bodyguard organization. Make ‘em de rigeur at all hours, screen ‘em and see that they really know how to shoot. I hate to meddle, but we can’t have the Government knocking our people off.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Lee said. “There’s a tie-up between the Government and the Mob. We got away from Ireland aboard a speed boat and we were picked up by a Mob lakes ore ship. It had been running gasoline and ammunition to the Government. Jimmy Regan was in charge of the deal. We jumped into Lake Michigan and made our way back here. We were in Mob Territory—down among the small-timers—long enough to establish that the Mob and Government are hand in glove. One of these day’s they’re going to jump us.”

  “Ah,” Taylor said softly. “I’ve thought so for a long time.”

  Charles burst out: “Then for God’s sake, Uncle Frank, why haven’t you done anything? You don’t know what it’s like out there. The Government’s a nightmare. They have slaves. And the Mob’s not much better. Numbers! Restrictions! Permits! Passes! And they don’t call it that, but they have taxes!”

  “They’re mad,” Lee said. “Quite mad. And I’m talking technically. Neurotics and psychotics swarm in the streets of Mob Territory. The Government, naturally—but the Mob was a shock. We’ve got to get ready, Mr. Taylor. Every psychotic or severe neurotic in Syndic Territory is a potential agent of theirs.”

  “Don’t just check off the Government, darling,” Charles said tensely. “They’ve got to be smashed. They’re no good to themselves or anybody else. Life’s a burden there if only they knew it. And they’re holding down the natives by horrible cruelty.”

  Taylor leaned back and asked: “What do you recommend?”

  Charles said: “A fighting fleet and an army.”

  Lee said: “Mass diagnosis of the unstable. Screening of severe cases and treatment where it’s indicated. Riveredge must be a plague-spot of agents.”

  Taylor shook his head and told them: “It won’t do.”

  Charles was aghast. “It won’t do? Uncle Frank, what the hell do you mean, it won’t do? Didn’t we make it clear? They want to invade us and loot us and subject us!”

  “It won’t do,” Taylor said. “I choose the devil we know. A fighting fleet is out. We’ll arm our merchant vessels and hope for the best. A full-time army is out. We’ll get together some-kind of militia. And a roundup of the unstable is out.”

  “Why?” Lee demanded. “My people have worked out perfectly effective techniques—”

  “Let me talk, please. I have a feeling that it won’t be any good, but hear me out.

  “I’ll take your black art first, Lee. As you know, I have played with history. To a historian, your work has been very interesting. The sequence was this: study of abnormal psychology collapsed under Lieberman’s findings, study of abnormal psychology revived by you when you invalidated Liebe
rman’s findings. I suggest that Lieberman and his followers were correct—and that you were correct. I suggest that what changed was the makeup of the population. That would mean that before Lieberman there were plenty of neurotics and psychotics to study, that in Lieberman’s time there were so few that earlier generalizations were invalidated, and that now—in our time, Lee—neurotics and psychotics are among us again in increasingly ample numbers.”

  The girl opened her mouth, shut it again and thoughtfully studied her nails.

  “I will not tolerate,” Taylor went on, “a roundup or a registration, or mass treatment or any such violation of the Syndic’s spirit.”

  Charles exploded: “Damn it, this is a matter of life or death to the Syndic!”

  “No, Charles. Nothing can be a matter of life or death to the Syndic. When anything becomes a matter of life or death to the Syndic, the Syndic is already dead, its morale, is already disintegrated, its credit already gone. What is left is not the Syndic but the Syndic’s dead shell. I am not placed so that I can say objectively now whether the Syndic is dead or alive. I fear it is dying. The rising tide of neurotics is a symptom. The suggestion from you two, who should be imbued with the old happy-go-lucky, we-can’t-miss esprit of the Syndic that we cower behind mercenaries instead of trusting the people who made us—that’s another symptom. Dick Reiner’s rise to influence on a policy of driving the Government from the seas is another symptom.

  “I mentioned the devil we know as my choice. That’s the status quo, even though I have reason to fear it’s crumbling beneath our feet. If it is, it may last out our time. We’ll shore it up with armed merchantmen and a militia. If the people are with us now as they always have been, that’ll do it. The devil we don’t know is what we’ll become if we radically dislocate Syndic life and attitudes.

  “I can’t back a fighting fleet. I can’t back a regular army. I can’t back any restrictive measure on the freedom of anybody but an apprehended criminal. Read history. It has taught me not to meddle, it has taught me that no man should think himself clever enough or good enough to dare it. That is the lesson history teaches us.

  “Who can know what he’s doing when he doesn’t even know why he does it? Bless the bright Cromagnon for inventing the bow and damn him for inventing missile warfare. Bless the stubby little Sumerians for miracles in gold and lapis lazuli and damn them for burying a dead queen’s hand-maidens living in her tomb. Bless Shih Hwang-Ti for building the Great Wall between northern barbarism and southern culture, and damn him for burning every book in China. Bless King Minos for the ease of Cnossian flush toilets and damn him for his yearly tribute of Greek sacrificial victims. Bless Pharaoh for peace and damn him for slavery. Bless the Greeks for restricting population so the well-fed few could kindle a watch-tower in the west, and damn the prostitution and sodomy and wars of colonization by which they did it. Bless the Romans for their strength to smash down every wall that hemmed their building genius, and damn them for their weakness that never broke the bloody grip of Etruscan savagery on their minds. Bless the Jews who discovered the fatherhood of God and damn them who limited it to the survivors of a surgical operation. Bless the Christians who abolished the surgical preliminaries and damn them who substituted a thousand cerebral quibbles. Bless Justinian for the Code of Law and damn him for his countless treacheries that were the prototype of the wretched Byzantine millenium. Bless the churchmen for teaching and preaching, and damn, them for drawing a line beyond which they could only teach and preach in peril of the stake.

  “Bless the navigators who, opened the new world to famine-ridden Europe, and damn them for syphillis. Bless the red-skins who bred maize, the great preserver of life and damn them for breeding maize the great destroyer of topsoil. Bless the Virginia planters for the solace of tobacco and damn them for the red gullies they left where forests had stood. Bless the obstetricians with forceps who eased the agony of labor and damn them for bringing countless monsters into the world to reproduce their kind. Bless the Point Four boys who slew the malaria mosquitoes of Ceylon and damn them for letting more Sinhalese be born then five Ceylons could feed.

  “Who knows what he is doing, why he does it or what the consequences will be?

  “Let the social scientists play with their theories if they like; I’m fond of poetry myself. The fact is that they have not so far solved what I call the two-billion-body problem. With brilliant hindsight some of them tell us that more than a dozen civilizations have gone down into the darkness before us. I see no reason why ours should not go down into the darkness with them, nor do I see any reason why we should not meanwhile enjoy ourselves collecting sense-impressions to be remembered with pleasure in old age. No; I will not agitate for extermination of the Government and hegemony over the Mob. Such a policy would automatically, inevitably and immediately entail many, many violent deaths and painful wounds. The wrong kind of sense-impressions. I shall, with fear and trembling, recommend the raising of a militia—a purely defensive, extremely sloppy militia—and pray that it will not Involve us in a war of aggression.”

  He looked at the two of them and shrugged. “Lee, so stern, Charles so grim,” he said. “I suppose you’re dedicated now.” He looked at the desk.

  He thought: I have a faint desire to take the pistol from my desk and shoot you both. I have a nervous feeling that you’re about to embark on a crusade to awaken Syndic Territory to its perils. You think the fate of civilization hinges on you. You’re right, of course. The fate of civilization hinges on every one of us at any given moment. We are all components in the two-billion-body problem. Somehow for a century we’ve achieved in Syndic Territory for almost everybody the civil liberties, peace of mind and living standards that were enjoyed by the middle classes before 1914—plus longer life, better health, a more generous morality, increased command over nature; minus the servant problem and certain superstitions. A handful of wonderfully pleasant decades. When you look back over history you wonder who in his right mind could ask for more. And you wonder who would dare to presume to tamper with it.

  He studied the earnest young faces. There was so much that he might say—but he shrugged again.

  “Bless you,” he said. “Gather ye sense impression while ye may. Some like pointer readings, some like friction on the mucous membranes. Now go about your business; I have work to do.”

  He didn’t really. When he was alone he leaned back and laughed and laughed.

  Win, lose or draw, those two would go far and enjoy themselves mightily along the way. Which was what counted.

  AFTER BONESTELL, by Jay Lake

  How many times can a man wake up in a lifetime?

  It occurs to me that question could stand some rephrasing. At the least, to account for certain values of “man” and “lifetime.”

  Damn, I hate questions. Every time I instantiate, I seem to come online with a question or ten.

  I’ve got eyes again. That’s nice. It has been aeon or two since optical sensors were in fashion. Someone—the Voldrani?—had been towing the Earth extremely long distances at Newtonian speeds. That takes a while, to put it mildly. Even stars eventually notice something that happens that slowly. Not a lot to see sailing between the spiral arms without a primary to light your days, not without some big arrays.

  My eyes tell me there’s light. Meaning, widespread electromagnetic radiation between 380 and 780 ångströms. I haven’t had a koniocortex in over a gigayear, measured by my 238U clock, but there’s still something comforting about a sky full of blue light. Even if it is strangely sourceless. There’s still a monkey screaming in the trees, somewhere deep in the simulation which is my consciousness.

  Someone’s knocking, too. I don’t wake up just to put out the cat. I don’t seem to have any virtual data streams or neutrino matrices or any of my other billenial gear at the moment, so I use my eyes to look around.

  Amazingly, they do.

  I see rocks, and slush, and a blue sky with scattered clouds. This could be Montana,
if Montana weren’t lost to plate tectonics and the crustal deformations of an Earth in tow longer than the life cycle of a Type K red giant. Not just rocks, buttes even. Mesas. I reach for a whole library of the geology of the dynamic planet so long dead beneath my feet before I realize the network is missing.

  Not dormant or silent.

  Missing.

  And by all the gods of ancient days, I have feet.

  Then the planet says, “Hello.”

  #

  I walk. I am ankle-deep in the slush, which isn’t really snow. Not as some portion of my biological memory understands. It’s white, but it has the consistency of talcum powder. It’s chilly, but not nearly cold enough. I’m pretty sure walking naked in the snow of my childhood would have turned my feet blue. Not to mention the rest of me.

  And the air is warm.

  Already I am doubting the miracle. Maybe I just think it’s warm. This air could be supercooled helium, but if this body were adapted to it…

  I shake the thought off as unworthy.

  The planet whines after me like a dog with separation anxiety, but I ignore it. Earth and I have been bedmates for well over a billion years and she’s never spoken to me once. I don’t need to answer her now.

  Instead I experiment with kicking the slush, tossing it, spreading the powder like chaff on the desultory wind which seems to have sprung up at my thought. The clouds overhead seem almost painted onto the sky, but the air is moving.

  For a moment I stop on some bare rock and contemplate the marvel that is my feet. Long, bony toes, as if evolution were part way through changing its mind about whether I should walk on the ground or spend my life in the trees. Tiny hairs spiraling from the knuckle joints of my toes, save the littlest one which is clean and smooth as a baby’s thighs. The metatarsals are a subtle texture under the thin skin that tops them. At my merest thought, the toes clench and the skin ripples.

  Then the weird, warm snow blows sticky smooth across me and I realize none of this is possible. It never was. Just for starters, my feet have been gone almost since time began.