The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack

by Isaac Asimov

  Assured that he might be able to succeed, President Carfax went to work to prove his words. The Strugglers began anew the experiments that had been truncated by the death of Grenson.

  They worked to within an ace of solving the secret of controllable fusion power. Carfax himself got far enough to extract a terrific amount of energy from a cube of copper. From incredibly small pieces of highly conducive metal he built up a model power plant, which, on a giant scale, would replace the already sadly worn and failing equipment from which the cities derived their light and power.

  The other scientists explored different realms. Some reasoned out new methods of synthesis by which the fast waning supplies of oil and coal could be replaced. Another was convinced that he had transmutation of metals in his grip, with which the cities could be repaired as time went on. Yet another saw his chance of harnessing the waste energy of the sun on a large scale.

  By degrees, under Carfax’s fine leadership, the determined scientists began to lay plans for the foundation of real Utopia.

  Then the Arbiter struck! In a public speech it declared that the discoveries claimed, by President Vincent Carfax and his colleagues were nothing better than fancy. The Arbiter took sides with the Opposers and launched a small but savagely effective massacre against the Strugglers. In three days of desperate skirmish and slaughter Carfax and his followers were wiped out. Horley Dodd, leader of the Opposers, was killed too.

  Not that it signified much. The Opposers were now in complete control, backed always by the implacable Arbiter.

  Languid with victory, the Opposers lazily repaired the damage and then sat back to enjoy the comforts that Vincent Carfax had sworn were coming to an end. Apathy set in, born of lack of anything to accomplish. Even the Arbiter had nothing left to judge. The final vanquishing had shown to the Opposers that progress was a form of disease and entirely unnecessary. Better to relax and enjoy the fruits of labor.

  The year 2048 passed away and was followed by a gap of somnolent, drifting years until 2060. Nothing had been accomplished, nothing done. Life was one great bliss of effortless satisfaction. The pioneers were lost in the mists of memory. Science, as an art; had ceased to be.

  2060—2080—3000—and the Arbiter was still in faultless condition. Indeed it had been made indestructible.

  Men and women died, children were born in limited members, grew up, each one knowing less of science than those before them. Astronomy, physics, mathematics? They were things the ancients had studied, said the history records. Somewhere in the smeared archives was the name of Selby Doyle.

  Then in 3000 came the first warnings of the trouble Carfax had foreseen. The weather controlling machinery broke down, its central bearings worn out from continued inattention. In consequence the weather suddenly reverted to its former unreliable state and deluged whole continents of synthetic crops, destroyed a world’s food supply for a year.

  Hurricanes tore across the world. Cities that were slow1y eroding through continued lack of repair eroded still more. That gray metal, so shiny at first, was cracking now, flaking under the continued onslaught of the elements.

  A nervous flurry passed through the people. For the first time they were really alarmed. They rushed to the weather controlling station but could only stare helplessly at silent, useless machinery. Knowledge was dead.

  This was not all. Trouble came thick and fast. With the failure of the crops, animals began to die off. The machines that tended them only functioned so long as they received—from still other machines—steady supplies of crops, specially developed for cattle consumption. When the supply stopped the machines stopped too, and nobody knew what to do about it.

  The seed of disaster flourished with terrific speed, burst the foundations of the formerly calm cities and upset the tranquility of the pleasure-softened people. The collapse of the weather machinery presaged the overture to the end. Blinding cataracts of rain seeped through corroded roofs, the water short-circuiting the vital power and light machinery, already at breaking point through wear and tear.

  Light and power failed in each city simultaneously. Famine reared over a disturbed, turmoiled world girt about with scurrying clouds. In desperation the people turned to the Arbiter, their leader.

  But the Arbiter did nothing! It ignored the wild pleas hurled at it, marched out of the insecure laboratory that was its home and departed into the storm-lashed country. In the hour of need it had deserted them.

  Panic seized the people at the realization. They fled from cities, whither they knew not, floundered in a mad exodus seeking food that was not there, cursing aloud to the heavens because synthesis had destroyed all natural growth and cultivation. Specialization had been proved a tragedy. Escape from a world that was too perfect became an obsession.

  Gradually, inevitably, it was forced upon the people in those hours of mad struggle and desperation that they were face to face with certain extinction.

  3010. Panic and struggle had gone. A strange calm was on the world. Cities, crumbled through disuse, ravaged by tempest and flood, poked blind, inquisitive spires to cleared skies. The sun crossed a sky that was, in the main, peaceful again. Climate had adjusted back to its normal vagaries.

  But the soft winds of spring, the hot sun of summer, the cool chill of the fall, and the heavy snows of winter fell on bones that were scattered, white and forgotten, across Earth’s face. Alone in this world of emptiness, where natural grass and trees were trying once more to struggle through, there moved a cumbersome affair of metal, still cold and impartial, inhuman and relentless.

  It climbed mountains. it prowled plains, it searched the ruins of cities, it brooded alone. The Arbiter.

  3040 A.D. 3060 A.D. Then the aliens came.

  They were strange, birdlike creatures, masters of space travel, lords of their own peculiar science. They came not as conquerors but with the intention of making friends with the third-world people. Their amazement was complete when they could not find a soul alive.

  Then eventually they found the Arbiter. With their superior science they analyzed it, probed its deepest secrets, broke open the supposedly impregnable sheathing by four-dimensional tools.

  The aliens remained on Earth for several days while the leading scientist, Cor Santu, pondered over the curious mystery of a lost race. From studying the dissembled Arbiter and the still remaining records of human events, transcribed by the Leader of Languages, he built up an explanation of the problem.

  “Poor earthly scientists!” was his final comment. “Brilliant men indeed—but they forgot one thing. If a world or people are to survive it must have progress, even as we have found in our own experience. Wars are indeed evil and should be prevented. But dictators are worse. Right alone can prevail in the end.

  “Selby Doyle and Vincent Carfax did not trust to Right, to a Universal mind control for guidance. No, they invented a machine of twelve mechanical brains to bring them peace. Such a device could not solve the problem. They forgot that a brain, in progressing, must expand. We have seen that, in any case, these Earth beings only used a fifth of their full brain capacity. That, later, would have developed. But in the machine they strangled it. Carfax and the surgeon Gascoyne made these mechanical brains fixed to what was, at that time, the present. To the Arbiter it was always the present! Being rigid metal the imprisoned brains could not expand, could not go a step beyond the day of their creation. That is why the Arbiter destroyed all things that suggested progress, and also because it feared any sign of progress would bring its power to an end. It was just another dictator.

  “Such metal bound brains, living in a past world, could not visualize anything progressive. Conservationism gone mad! From the instant the brains were molded of metal they deteriorated. And having no human sentiment they destroyed without question. So when the great catastrophe came the Arbiter was powerless—as powerless as all the others who had not kept pace with progress. Nature must progress, or perish. That is evolution.”

  Thereon Cor Sa
ntu ended his observations. But when his fleet of spaceships soared through the sunny sky towards fresh worlds of exploration, there was left behind a smashed, irreparable mass of melted cogs, wires, and movements. It was a rusting monument to a race that had died—a race that had fallen prey to laziness and surrendered its freedom to the ruthless whims of a machine.

  THE GRANDMOTHER-GRANDDAUGHTER CONSPIRACY, by Marissa Lingen

  Dr. Hannah Vang watched the cephalid turn the box over with his tentacles. She leaned forward, aware of the timer out of the corner of her eye without watching it. He was a smart beastie, she knew, and would get into the box to get the icthyoid in it. The question was whether he’d learned anything from last time. It was the same box, the same latching mechanism, everything as much the same as she could make it.

  The seconds ticked by. Finally the box sprung open, and Hannah sighed; seventy-two-point-three seconds. It had taken seventy-one-point-eight before.

  The squid-like alien did not remember. Probably it could not remember. And that was going to be a problem.

  Delta Moncerotis Four was home to a human colony of about twenty thousand. No one knew how many of the native cephalids there were, in seven different major species. They swarmed through the oceans, some of them phosphorescing merrily. They mingled with each other, except for the ones that didn’t seem to. They used things to pry into other things, if the other things were good to eat.

  The two things they did not seem to do were remembering and communicating with the alien monkeys who had invaded the part of their planet they weren’t using anyway.

  Which would not have been important if the alien monkeys in question hadn’t wanted to gently but firmly kick the cephalids out of the waters around their city to build an isolated area for human-edible aquaculture.

  Hannah was sure that having the cephalids where they belonged would be good for the environment and good for the colonists. There was so much planet left to survey that the cephalid interactions with local coraloids and icthyoids might vary extremely, and, from her marine xenobiologist standpoint, interestingly. She had chosen a largely watery planet for a reason. But with an entire planet worth of oceans for the cephalids to inhabit, it was hard to convince the colony government that the specific area around the city was absolutely necessary for the continued well-being of anyone in particular.

  “We change planets when we settle,” the governor had told her. “That’s just how it is. If it was an intelligent species—”

  “They’re tool-users!” Hannah had protested.

  “They appear to be opportunistic tool-users. You know that as well as I do. They’ll pick something up and make it into a skewer or a pry bar, and then they’ll drop it in the silt and do the whole thing over again with a different piece of vegetation or rock next time they need the very same tool. If they could tell us they wanted to be where they are, we’d listen. We’ve had a good record of that since the third wave of colonies.”

  “I know. It’s just—even if they don’t remember things like us, they have their own interactions with their environment, that we barely know about yet!”

  The governor had sighed. “If you can get any form of communication with them, we’ll see what they have to say. But if we can’t talk to them, we’ll have to treat them like animals.” At her sad look, the governor said, “We treat animals better than we used to.”

  Still, even with the aquaculture developments well into development, Hannah found herself more determined, not less, that she would find some way to communicate. This was not proving easy with a species that seemed to figure everything out as if for the first time.

  On the other hand, it made them easy to keep entertained. She left the cephalid with a ring puzzle it had seen a dozen times before, busily trying the different ways to get the rings unhooked, and went home for the night.

  When the door slid open, Hannah could hear her mother’s voice in the living room. “You’re in my house, and you look like me, so you must be my daughter—no, granddaughter?”

  “That’s right, Granny Dee,” Lily said. “I’m your granddaughter. Lily.”

  “But I don’t remember you,” said Dee thoughtfully. Hannah closed her eyes and leaned against the door, letting them go through the ritual without her. It was best when Dee was not interrupted once she’d pulled the implant loose. The long pause was always the same. “And I remember that we’ve gotten good at curing genetic memory problems, so this isn’t the normal deterioration with age.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Lily. “You were in an accident. But we’ve got a device that can help you. You just have to plug this little cord back into the socket here, see?”

  The pause here was even longer, as it always was: Dee deciding whether she could trust her granddaughter, then agreeing, as always, to plug the augmenter back in. And then Dee’s voice was surer, just as analytical but with better data. “I’m sorry, Lily.”

  “Hey, no problem.” Hannah decided that was her cue to enter, just in time to see Lily kissing her grandmother on the cheek. “Could happen to anyone.”

  In fact, if it could happen to anyone, if it was common the way organic memory problems were, they might have a better design. Hannah had asked her mother three times if she didn’t want to move back to a larger colony, somewhere they had the personnel and equipment for a more permanent implant. But Dee’s response had been impatient.

  “This is your home,” she’d said. “And it’s my home, and more than all that, it’s Lily’s home. I don’t want to be somewhere else. We’ll plug it back in and go along with our lives, you and me and Brian and Lily. We’ll get by.”

  But Brian had left. He couldn’t stand dealing with Dee, and Hannah, when she was honest with herself, couldn’t entirely blame him. Her mother couldn’t live alone with the implant’s unreliability, and the colony wasn’t big enough to have facilities. But she wished things had been otherwise.

  “It’s easy for you,” Brian had said, throwing his clothes in his suitcase.

  Hannah had let her voice rise: “Easy?”

  For a moment he was the old Brian, the man she’d married. The one she’d counted on for Lily’s sake. “I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t mean easy. I know it’s not; she’s your mother. I know it’s not. But when you come home and she’s pulled the implant loose, she lets you talk her through to plugging it back in again. I don’t have time to deal with the constable every time I get back from work before Lily gets home from school! I don’t have the energy, Hannah. You know I always liked Dee, but—”

  “But,” Hannah agreed.

  “The good memories are getting soiled with every conversation with the constable,” said Brian. “With every time I have to justify my existence in my own house again.”

  Lily was like most of the colony kids, tough and talented, resilient, not afraid of work. She was not thrilled to have her father living across town. She was not thrilled to have to plug her grandmother back together every few days. But Hannah was proud to see that her daughter already understood that her life was not a series of endless thrills; Lily did what needed doing without a great deal of fuss about it.

  Hannah tried not to brood over dinner with her mother and her daughter. “Still nothing from the squids, huh?” said Lily.

  “Nothing,” said Hannah miserably. “I keep thinking I’ve got a chance at least, and then—” She wiggled her fingers in the air like tentacles. “They’re so clever. They’re so very good at figuring things out. If the other species are as clever as the pink ones, no wonder there’s sort of a squiddy feel to the whole ocean.”

  “But they’re still not clever enough to signal back and forth,” said her mother.

  “They’re not the right kind of clever. It’s not what they do,” said Hannah. “I’m really starting to think we’re on the brink of proving—to beyond a shadow of my doubt anyway—that this is just not what they do.”

  “But it’s what we do,” said Lily.

  Hannah sighed. “Exactly.”


  And if the alien species they encountered couldn’t bend far enough to do things the human way, would the humans bend enough to see how they were doing them instead? It had worked with some of the larger colonies of lichen-like species on Gamma Centauri Four, but elsewhere results were mixed. And on Earth, dogs and cats were immensely more popular as pets than squid and lichen.

  The cephalid did not grow easier over the next few weeks. Hannah watched her clever subject make his morning rounds. The pink tentacles groped along the tank, then slowed, delicately searching for something in the silt. Hannah’s heart skipped a beat: had he hidden something there for later? Would he remember after all?

  But no; after churning up the silt so that it wafted into the water, the cephalid resumed his exploration of the tank. He had likely been looking for a snack, and that was the sort of terrain in which juicy tidbits lurked. Instinct, not memory. Or perhaps they should think of it as species memory rather than individual memory? In that case, they’d be relying upon generations upon generations of mutation to teach the cephalids how to communicate with humans. Not, Hannah thought, heartening.

  She tried putting one of the remote machines into the tank with the cephalid and showing it how to do a few of the tricks she’d done. It repeated them, watching; there was something there that looked like short-term memory. But it didn’t last. No matter how many times she went back to the same puzzles, the cephalids didn’t recall how to work them after they’d been out of sight, or after even a few minutes had passed.

  Her return home was smooth and peaceful; Dee’s implant had stayed plugged in, and she and Lily were frying tofu for dipping in nuoc leo sauce. Their hands were equally sure, and all the tofu came out soft in the middle and crisp on the outside, just perfect, just the way Hannah liked it, just the way she could never make it herself.

  Hannah watched Lily doing the dishes. She was nearing the age when colony kids found apprenticeships or went offworld to study. She wanted to ask Lily what she hoped to do, but she was afraid of the answer. Instead, she sought the mundane. “Got any plans for the weekend?”