The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  The priest shrugged. “Food, of course. The grethi eat any kind of meat—even our people—but we have to examine the laws to find whether you’re permitted. If you are, we’ll need freshly killed specimens to sample, so we’re waiting with you.”

  “You mean you’re attacking us for food?”

  The priest grunted harshly. “No! We’re on a holy mission to exterminate you. The Lord Almighty commanded us to go down to Earth where abominations existed and to leave no living creature under your sun.”

  He turned and waddled out of the store, taking the single remaining torch with him, leaving only the dim light of the moon and reflections from farther away.

  Amos dropped onto a stool inside the cage. “They had to lock us in a new building instead of one I know,” he said. “If it had been the church, we might have had a chance.”

  “How?” Doc asked sharply.

  Amos tried to describe the passage through the big unfinished basement under the church, reached through a trap door. Years before, a group of teen-agers had built a sixty-foot tunnel into it and had used it for a private club until the passage had been discovered and bricked over from outside. The earth would be soft around the bricks, however. Beyond, the outer end of the tunnel opened in a wooded section, which led to a drainage ditch that in turn connected with the Republican River. From the church, they could move to the stream and slip down that without being seen. There was even an alley—or had been one—behind the store that would take them to the shadow of the trees around the church.

  Doc’s fingers were fumbling with the lock as Amos finished. He grunted and reached for his pocket, taking out a few coins. “They don’t know much about us, Amos, if they expect to hold us here, where the lock is fastened from the inside. Feel those screws.”

  Amos fumbled over the lock surface. There were four large screws on the back of the lock, holding it to the door. The cashier’s cage had been designed to keep others out, not to serve as a jail. At best, he thought, it was a poor chance. Yet was it merely chance? It seemed more like the hand of God to him.

  “More like the stupidity of the aliens, to my mind,” Doc objected. He was testing the screws with a quarter now. He nodded in some satisfaction, then swore. “Damn it, the quarter fits the slot, but I can’t get enough leverage to turn the screw. Hey, Smithton or whatever your name is, pull out that money drawer and knock the bottom out. I need a couple of narrow slats.”

  Smithton had been praying miserably—a childhood prayer for laying himself down to sleep. But he succeeding in kicking out splinters from the drawer bottom.

  Doc selected two and clamped them around the quarter, trying to hold them in place while he turned them. It was rough going, but the screws turned. Three came loose finally, and the lock rotated on the fourth until they could force the cage open.

  Doc stopped and pulled Smithton to him. “Follow me, and do what I do. No talking, no making a separate jump, or I’ll break your neck. All right!”

  The back door was locked, but from the inside. They opened it to a backyard filled with garbage. The alley wasn’t as dark as it should have been, since open lots beyond let some light come through. They hugged what shadows they could until they reached the church hedge. There they groped along, lining themselves up with the side office door. There was no sign of aliens.

  Amos broke ahead of the others, being more familiar with the church. It wasn’t until he had reached the door that he realized it could have been locked; it had been kept that way part of the time. He grabbed the handle and forced it back—to find it unlatched.

  For a second, he stopped to thank the Lord for their luck. Then the others were with him, crowding into the little kitchen where social suppers were prepared. He’d always hated those functions, but now he blessed them for providing a hiding place that gave them time to find their way. There were sounds in the church, and odors, but none that seemed familiar to Amos. Something made the back hairs of his neck prickle. He took off his shoes and tied them around his neck, and the others followed suit.

  The way to the trap door lay down a small hall, across in front of the altar, and into the private office on the other side.

  They were safer together than separated, particularly since Smithton was with them. Amos leaned back against the kitchen wall to catch his breath. His heart seemed to have a ring of needled pain around it, and his throat was so dry that he had to fight desperately against gagging. There was water here, but he couldn’t risk rummaging across the room to the sink.

  He was praying for strength, less for himself than for the others. Long since, he had resigned himself to die. If God willed his death, he was ready; all he had were dead and probably mutilated, and he had succeeded only in dragging those who tried to help him into mortal danger. He was old, and his body was already treading its way to death. He could live for probably twenty more years, but aside from his work, there was nothing to live for—and even in that, he had been only a mediocre failure. But he was still responsible for Doc Miller, and even for Smithton now.

  He squeezed his eyes together and squinted around the doorway. There was some light in the hall that led toward the altar, but he could see no one, and there were drapes that gave a shadow from which they could spy the rest of their way. He moved to it softly, and felt the others come up behind him.

  He bent forward, parting the drapes a trifle. They were perhaps twenty feet in front of the altar, on the right side. He spotted the wreckage that had once stood as an altar. Then he frowned as he saw evidence of earth piled up into a mound of odd shape.

  He threw the cloth back farther, surprised at the curiosity in him, as he had been surprised repeatedly by the changes taking place in himself. There were two elaborately robed priests kneeling in the center of the chapel. But his eye barely noticed them before it was attracted to what stood in front of the new altar.

  A box of wood rested on an earthenware platform. On it were four marks, which his eyes recognized as unfamiliar, but which his mind twisted into a sequence from no alphabet he had learned; yet in them was always more than they were. And above the box was a veil, behind which Something shone brightly without light.

  In his mind, a surge of power pulsed, making something that might almost have been words through his thoughts.

  “I AM THAT I AM, who brought those out of bondage from Egypt and who wrote upon the wall before Belshazzar, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN, as it shall be writ large upon the Earth, from this day forth. For I have said unto the seed of Mikhtchah, thou art my chosen people and I shall exalt thee above all the races under the heavens!”

  5

  And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.

  He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword.

  Revelation 13:7, 10

  THE BOOK OF THE CHRISTIANS

  The seed of Mikhtchah. The seed that was the aliens…

  There was no time and all time, then. Amos felt his heart stop, but the blood pounded through his arteries with a vigor it had lacked for decades. He felt Ruth’s hand in his, stirring with returning life, and knew she had never existed. Beside him, he saw Doc Miller’s hair turn snow white and knew that it was so, though the was no way he could see Doc from his position.

  He felt the wrath of the Presence rest upon him, weighing his every thought from his birth to his certain death, where he ceased completely and went on forever, and yet he knew that the Light behind the veil was unaware of him, but was receptive only to the two Mikhtchah priests who knelt unaware.

  All of that was with but a portion of his mind so small that he could not locate it, though his total mind encompassed all time and space, and that which was neither; yet each part of his perceptions occupied all of his mind that had been or ever could be, save only the present, which somehow was a concept not yet solved by the One before him.

&n
bsp; He saw a strange man on a low mountain, receiving tablets of stone that weighed only a pennyweight, engraved with a script that all could read. And he knew the man, but refused to believe it, since the garments were not those of his mental image, and the clean-cut face fitted better with the strange Egyptian headpiece than with the language being spoken.

  Amos saw every prayer of his life tabulated. But nowhere was there the mantle of divine warmth which he had felt as a boy and had almost felt again the morning before. And there was a stirring of unease at his thought, mixed with wrath; yet while the thought was in his mind, nothing could touch him.

  Yet each of those things was untrue, because he could find no understanding of that which was true.

  It ended as abruptly as it had begun, either a microsecond or a million subjective years after. It left him numbed, but newly alive. And it left him dead as no man had ever been hopelessly dead before.

  He knew only that before him was the Lord God Almighty, who had made a covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob, and with their seed; and that mankind had been rejected, while God now was on the side of the enemies of Abraham’s seed, and all the nations of earth.

  Even that was too much for a human mind no longer in touch with the Presence, and only a shadow of it remained.

  Beside him, Amos heard Doc Miller begin breathing again, brushing the white hair back from his forehead wonderingly as he muttered a single word. “God!”

  One of the Mikhtchah priests looked up, his eyes turning about; there was a glazed look on his face, but it was leaving.

  Then Smithton screamed! His open mouth poured out a steady, unwavering screaming, while his lungs panted in and out. His eyes opened, staring horribly. Like a wooden doll on strings, the man stood up and walked forward. He avoided the draperies and headed for the Light behind the veil. Abruptly, the Light was gone, but Smithton walked toward it as steadily as before. He stopped before the falling veil, and the scream cut off sharply.

  Doc had jerked silently to his feet, tugging Amos up behind him. The minister lifted himself, but he knew there was no place to go. It was up to the will of God now…Or…

  Smithton turned on one heel precisely. His face was rigid and without expression, yet completely mad. He walked mechanically forward toward the two priests they sprawled aside at the last second, holding two obviously human-made automatics, but making no effort to use them. Smithton walked on toward the open door at the front of the church.

  He reached the steps, with the two priests staring after him. His feet lifted from the first step to the second and then he was on the sidewalk.

  The two priests fired!

  Smithton jerked, halted, and suddenly cried out in a voice of normal, rational agony. His legs kicked frantically under him and he ducked out of the sight of the doorway, his faltering steps sounding farther and farther away. He was dead—the Mikhtchah marksmanship had been as good as it seemed always to be—but still moving, though slower and slower, as if some extra charge of life were draining out like a battery running down.

  The priests exchanged quick glances and then darted after him, crying out as they dashed around the door into the night. Abruptly, a single head and hand appeared again, to snap a shot at the draperies from which Smithton had come. Amos forced himself to stand still, while his imagination supplied the jolt of lead in his stomach. The bullet hit the draperies, and something else.

  The priest hesitated, and was gone again. Amos broke into a run across the chapel and into the hall at the other side of the altar. He heard the faint sound of Doc’s feet behind him.

  The trap door was still there, unintentionally concealed under carpeting. He forced it up and dropped through it into the four-foot depth of the incompleted basement, making room for Doc. They crouched together as he lowered the trap and began feeling his way through the blackness toward the other end of the basement. It had been five years since he had been down there, and then only once for a quick inspection of the work of the boys who had dug the tunnel.

  He thought he had missed it at first, and began groping for the small entrance. It might have caved in, for that matter. Then, two feet away, his hand found the hole and he drew Doc after him.

  It was cramped, and bits of dirt had fallen in places and had to be dug out of the way. Part of the distance was on their stomachs. They found the bricked-up wall ahead of them and began digging around it with their bare hands. It took another ten minutes, while distant sounds of wild yelling from the Mikhtchah reached them faintly. They broke through at last with bleeding hands, not bothering to check for aliens near. They reached a safer distance in the woods, caught their breaths, and went on.

  The biggest danger lay in the drainage trench, which was low in several places. But luck was with them, and these spots lay in shadow.

  Then the little Republican River lay in front of them, and there was a flatbottom boat nearby.

  Moments later they were floating down the stream, resting their aching lungs, while the boat needed only a trifling guidance. It was still night, with only the light from the moon, and there was little danger of pursuit by alien planes. Amos could just see Doc’s face as the man fumbled for a cigarette.

  He lighted it and exhaled deeply. “All right, Amos—you were right, and God exists. But damn it, I don’t feel any better for knowing that. I can’t see how God helps me—nor even how He’s doing the Mikhtchah much good. What do they get out of it, beyond a few miracles with the weather? They’re just doing God’s work.”

  “They get the Earth, I suppose—if they want it,” Amos said doubtfully. He wasn’t sure they did. Nor could he see how the other aliens tied into the scheme; if he had known the answers, they were gone now. “Doc, you’re still an atheist, though you now know God is.”

  The plump man chuckled bitterly. “I’m afraid you’re right. But at least I’m myself. You can’t be, Amos. You’ve spent your whole life on the gamble that God is right and that you must serve Him—when the only way you could serve was to help mankind. What do you do now? God is automatically right—but everything you’ve ever believed makes Him completely wrong, and you can only serve Him by betraying your people. What kind of ethics will work for you now?”

  Amos shook his head wearily, hiding his face in his hands. The same problem had been fighting its way through his own thoughts. His first reaction had been to acknowledge his allegiance to God without question; thirty years of conditioned thought lay behind that. Yet now he could not accept such a decision. As a man, he could not bow to what he believed completely evil, and the Mikhtchah were evil by every definition he knew.

  Could he tell people the facts, and take away what faith they had in any purpose in life? Could he go over to the enemy, who didn’t even want him except for their feeding experiments? Or could he encourage people to fight, with the old words that God was with them—when he knew the words were false? Yet their resistance might doom them to eternal hellfire for opposing God.

  It hit him then that he could remember nothing clearly about the case of a hereafter—either for or against it. What happened to a people when God deserted them? Were they only deserted in their physical form, and still free to win their spiritual salvation? Or were they completely lost? Did they cease to have souls that could survive? Or were those souls automatically consigned to hell, however noble they might be?

  No question had been answered for him. He knew that God existed, but he had known that before. He knew nothing now beyond that. He did not even know when God had placed the Mikhtchah before humanity. It seemed unlikely that it was as recent as his own youth. Otherwise, how could he account for the strange spiritual glow he had felt as an evangelist?

  “There’s only one rational answer,” he said at last. “It doesn’t make any difference what I decide! I’m only one man.”

  “So was Columbus when he swore the world was round. And he didn’t have the look on his face you’ve had since we saw God, Amos! I know now what the Bible means when it says
Moses’ face shone after he came down from the mountain, until he had to cover it with a veil. If I’m right, there’s little help for mankind if you decide wrong!”

  Doc tossed the cigarette over the side and lit another, and Amos was shocked to see that the man’s hands were shaking. The doctor shrugged, and his tone fell back to normal. “I wish we knew more. You’ve always thought almost exclusively in terms of the Old Testament and a few snatches of Revelation—like a lot of men who became evangelists. I’ve never really thought about God—I couldn’t accept Him, so I dismissed Him. Maybe that’s why we got the view of Him we did. I wish I knew where Jesus fits in, for instance. There’s too much missing. Too many imponderables and hiatuses. We have only two facts, and we can’t understand either. There is a manifestation of God which has touched both Mikhtchah and mankind; and He has stated now that He plans to wipe out mankind. We’ll have to stick to that.”

  Amos made one more attempt to deny the problem that was facing him. “Suppose God is only testing man again, as He did so often before?”

  “Testing?” Doc rolled the word on his tongue, and seemed to spit it out. The strange white hair seemed to make him older, and the absence of mockery in his voice left him almost a stranger. “Amos, the Hebrews worked like the devil to get Canaan; after forty years of wandering around a few square miles, God suddenly told them this was the land—and then they had to take it by the same methods men have always used to conquer a country. The miracles didn’t really decide anything. They got out of Babylon because the old prophets were slaving night and day to hold them together as one people, and because they managed to sweat it out until they finally got a break. In our own time, they’ve done the same things to get Israel, and with no miracles! It seems to me God always took it away, but they had to it back by themselves. I don’t think much of that kind of a test in this case.”

  Amos could feel all his values slipping and spinning. He realized that he was holding himself together only because of Doc; otherwise, his mind would have reached for madness, like any intelligence forced to solve the insoluble. He could no longer comprehend himself, let alone God. And the feeling crept into his thoughts that God couldn’t wholly understand him, either.