The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  The landing area itself was a huge, slightly irregular rectangle, roped off with movable standards and chains. It stretched eastward from near the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The huge statue of Lincoln looked down on the scene, and the face seemed even sadder than usual at the sight.

  Globe-helmeted Space Cadets were drawn in parallel ranks just outside the roped area. They stood at parade rest, but the polished tubes of their ray guns were thrust outward toward the pressing crowd, silently warning the people not to come any closer unless they wanted to be paralyzed or disintegrated.

  I looked at my wrist watch. Another minute had passed. The count-down seemed to stretch outward to infinity.

  “Maybe the Spacemen will understand,” Sara said, as if to comfort me.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I murmured. “I’m pretty sure they understand more about us than I’m proud of.”

  Perhaps it was my roving eye, I really don’t hold with the superstition that we can sense when we are being stared at, but, just the same, I began to look around to see if I could spot that penetrating stare at me once more. I found it.

  An enormously fat man was standing with a group of privileged newsmen over on the far side of the President’s stance. There was no doubt about it, he was staring directly at me, as if trying to read down into the depths of my soul. It was my first glimpse of Harvey Strickland, although, then, I didn’t know who he was. I was that ignorant of what really went on behind the scenes of democratic government.

  “What time is it now?” Sara was asking.

  “Six more minutes,” I answered. The sweep hand of my watch assured me it really was running.

  I looked away from Strickland—let him stare—and around the area again. The white marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial were lined with television cameras. More cameras peeked out from the observation windows atop the lofty Washington Monument. They were equipped with the latest lenses to present every detail of the landing in stark close-up, and no doubt the latest vibratory ears to record distant words spoken.

  Beyond the official party, reporters with portable units threaded through the teeming crowd, picking up a babble of inane comment. One Washington matron, introduced as a social leader and etiquette arbiter, giggled into the microphone.

  “Now remember, all you deah, deah people—if our visitors should be green spi—well, just a wee, wee bit different from us—let’s pretend not to notice anything wrong with them—shall we? They can’t help how they look, you know. We must remember to be tolerant. Just can’t afford to be provincial at a time like this. Now can we?”

  Her voice was blotted out by a huckster who had managed, somehow, to get up toward the front of the commoner crowd.

  “Space helmets! Space helmets! Get your soovineer space helmets! Only fi’ dollars while they last. Get ’em while they last, folks.”

  “It’s three minutes, now,” I said to Sara. “And still they’re not in sight.”

  “They’ll come,” she said. “They’re good. They wouldn’t hurt us by promising to come, and then not do it.”

  “Yeah,” I said dryly. “They’re the good ones. I’ll bet they wear white hats.”

  “Sh-h,” she whispered. “I understand how you feel, but other people mightn’t.”

  “I don’t know how I feel, myself,” I said. “So how could you? I just have a terrible dread that this has all been one gigantic hoax, right from the beginning. And if it has been…”

  The murmur from the crowd drowned out a sentence I didn’t know how to finish. First a whisper, then a sudden roar, like fire bursting out of control.

  “There it is! There it is!”

  Automobile horns began to blare across the city. Sirens swelled the volume of sound until ears were deafened. From somewhere out of sight, the Army cut loose with a twenty-four-gun salute. The Marine Corps Band struck up its marching song. The Space Cadets began stamping their feet in their famous drill march called Climbing to the Stars, which didn’t really go anywhere.

  I found the globe at last. It seemed to be coming directly out of the sun. Only by closing my eyes to slits could I follow its downward plunge.

  And it was coming at unbelievable speed, a daredevil speed straight down at us—a foolhardy stunt speed; a teen-age hot-rodder, manic speed; a show-off speed. Now that its angle was no longer against the sun, I could see its sapphire blue with the radiant star of light gleaming brighter than the sun’s rays.

  There was a stir in the crowd, that frozen moment before panic. Then, just at the instant when panic might indeed send us all crushing outward into the crowd crushing inward, the globe checked its hurtling descent, its flamboyant stupidity—and settled to the Mall as gently as a fallen leaf.

  That impulse which had started up from our assembled guts as a scream of terror changed to a deep and satisfying sigh of awe and wonder.

  As the globe settled, touched lightly against the pavement, it spiraled slowly until it presented the thin-line rectangle of a closed exit hatch to face the Presidential Party. That group breathed a sigh of relief. Apparently these visitors, whatever they might be like, had enough sense to know who was important. Apparently it wouldn’t start out with a faux pas, at least. Apparently the coming could be photographed and presented to the world as it actually happened, instead of being rerun and faked for public consumption at a later time.

  I watched, hardly breathing.

  A curved gangway materialized out of the side of the ship and dropped into position—gracefully, noiselessly.

  The crowd, too, seemed to hold its breath. A long stillness of frozen motion. Only the cameramen seemed to make small movements as they huddled, crouched, aimed their lenses, and waited.

  The exit hatch rolled back, and now we could see a blue light glowing softly from the interior of the spaceship.

  A soft rustle as the crowd seemed to lean forward.

  Then the first Spaceman appeared.

  He was human, tall, almost six-four, and built like a brick—and perfectly proportioned, beautifully muscled in all the right places. He was handsome with rugged masculinity. He was resplendent in platinum white uniform. Four circles of ebony braid decorated his tunic sleeves. On his left breast were row upon row of gleaming decorations. His shoulder insignia sparkled like diamonds in the morning sunlight. His white military cap, deep-visored, was set slightly to one side of his head. On the visor was a radiant star in white gold, set in coruscating fire of a circle of diamonds.

  The crowd remained hushed.

  Over all the vast assembly there was no sound. Then the faint rustle of stretching brassieres as the ladies began to lift their mammary appendages into more prominent view.

  Far back, from a vantage point where they could get a preview look at their customers, the call girls grimaced cynically and gave up anticipation. There’d be no customers for them, not when there was such obviously free and palpitating competition getting ready to start operations.

  As the first Spaceman stepped down the gangplank, his stride a free and easy thing of strength, his eyes swept the crowd.

  Was it imagination that they hesitated a moment on mine?

  His eyes swept on around, and then his aquiline, perfectly chiseled features broke into a broad, toothy grin.

  Signal for pandemonium. Caught breath, en masse, was let forth in a gusty roar. Voices broke loose in a cackle of relief. Women began to weep, and scream with adulation. Men hammered their hats into shapeless balls of felt. One small boy, obviously coached, threw a grubby handful of sticky, damp confetti; and in wild hysteria the people began to throw everything loose they had toward the landing field; watches, purses, tie clips, hats. Most of it landed on the heads of others, slipped down, and was trampled underfoot—but never mind.

  I stood immobile, expressionless. I think I was the only one not shouting and screaming. Even the President was waving his top hat in the air and shouting what he remembered from a college sports yell.

  The eyes of the grinning Spaceman came back
to me, caught me standing immobile. His expression did not change, but his eyes seemed to question.

  “Aren’t I doing it right?” he seemed to ask.

  But it was too fleeting for me to know. It had all happened during his first two steps down the gangplank.

  His two steps ahead, and then, behind him, from the hatch, stepped two more Spacemen, and then two more. They were all dressed the same, except the four had only three ebony circles on their sleeves, some fewer decorations across their breasts, and only the star of white gold, without the circle of diamonds, upon their visors.

  All were handsome, strong, virile, proud, beautiful.

  There would be no need for feeding in the scullery. No need for Junior League and Junior Chamber to go catching flies.

  They came all the way down the gangplank in formation. The first Spaceman paused at the bottom, a little shyly, proudly but a little embarrassed.

  But then, instead of stepping forward to the President, he made a sharp left turn, and all five of them marched over and came to a halt directly in front of me!

  “Take me to your leader!” he said.

  I looked at him. And to this day I don’t know whether or not my lip lifted in a sneer. I looked at him, and then I realized that about two billion people were watching this—this charade, this farce. Certainly the eyes of everybody there were staring at us.

  I took a deep breath.

  “Come with me,” I said, “I will take you to our leader.”

  I stepped up beside him. The four Star-ship crewmen fell in behind us. As one man, the General Staff from the Pentagon fell in behind them. We marched, with nobody out of step, to where the President was still standing. I halted in front of the President.

  “This is our leader,” I said to the Starman. “Mr. President,” I said, “may I present the men who have come from the stars.”

  At a prod from the House and Senate leaders, the President took a step forward, doffed his top hat, and smiled his fatuous vote-getting smile.

  “Men from the Stars,” he rolled sonorously, “Earth welcomes you. Earth thanks you for defeating our enemy.”

  It wasn’t too bad. Some White House speech writer had had enough sense to keep it simple.

  The Spacemen listened, their heads bowed modestly, their shoulders square and erect. The first Spaceman took one pace forward, cleared his throat—and blushed!

  The crowd was completely silent again.

  “Shucks, Mr. President,” he said in a West Texas drawl, “it wasn’t nothin’, really. Wasn’t nothin’ any red-blooded boy in the Right Thinkin’ Universe wouldn’t have done for his friends!”

  He broke into his exuberant grin again; that charming, careless, boyish, handsome, irrepressible, spontaneous grin which can be achieved only after hours upon hours of practice before a mirror.

  “We was just lucky, I guess!”

  FIFTEEN

  There was something wrong with my consistency.

  As soon as I grew certain, openly and honestly to myself, that it was all a gigantic hoax, I grew equally certain that it wasn’t. Admittedly there was no Earth power, no mentality, no equipment, no facilities, and no foolhardiness so great as to produce this hoax. That they had come from the stars I could not doubt. That they had deliberately hoaxed us I could not doubt. That they must have some alien motive for doing this I could not doubt.

  And the more normal these slap-happy fly-boys appeared to be, the wilder the acclaim and adulation of Official and Social Washington, and the world, the more I doubted them.

  They were not, surely they could not be what they seemed. Then what were they? Why and how had they so completely adopted Hollywood’s entirely spurious idea of what a hero should be? To conceal what?

  To look through the eyes of what might logically be assumed the surveillance of an alien life intelligence, I might not be proud of Man (he gave me little cause), but Man was, nonetheless, my own. For better or for worse, I was on his side.

  I longed to talk to someone about it, but as the day progressed I found no, kinship doubt in any other eyes. I was one attending an executive-suburban social who must tailor his tastes and opinions to public relations lest he give offense by seeming a minority.

  Not even Sara was with me, not this time. There had been no doubt in her eyes, the last time I’d seen her before the crowd separated us at the Mall. Her eyes had also been star sapphires.

  Unpracticed as I was in Washington’s diplomatic courtesies, I found myself quickly shuffled, shouldered, and edged away from the favored position the Starmen had given me at the Mall. Yet, to my astonishment, I found myself in the third car behind them in the parade on its way to Blair House across from the White House. I learned only later that it was Shirley, who did know Washington, working behind the scenes, who not only saw to it that I got a seat in that car but who laid down the law to every host and hostess in Washington that one Dr. Ralph Kennedy must be hurriedly added to their exclusive lists. Only later did I learn that the servants and office staff members are the real social and political arbiters of Washington—everybody else is too green and inexperienced to know.

  Both Official and Social Washington, after some cautious inquiry of their own servants, accepted Shirley’s judgment. Word was passed around (and my status grew in the telling) that I was the world’s foremost authority on extraterrestrial psychology (if I had been a mere second-foremost authority I couldn’t have got into the service entrance)… Adviser to the Pentagon, they say the top generals and admirals don’t make a move, a single move, without consulting him first…an admiral, himself, and therefore socially acceptable…you noticed, didn’t you, that the Spacemen picked him out to introduce them to the President, and they’re certainly All Right…therefore he must be too.…

  It seemed not to occur to anyone (else) to wonder how the Spacemen had known all this about me immediately upon landing—me standing there among all that resplendent brass and braid without so much as a good-conduct medal.

  It was while driving from one welcoming function to another in the late afternoon of the first day that I made first mental contact with them. Unhappily, it was my last for quite some time. This time, through Shirley’s influence, I had been given the seat beside the secret-service man who was driving their open car through the crowded streets. We were driving through a wild demonstration of celebrity worship. Bex, Dex, Jex, Kex, and Lex, seated in the rear of the car, were busy grinning handsomely, smirking, and occasionally saluting the crowd.

  “You’re setting us back a hundred years,” I grumbled sourly, while I tried to look both brilliant and happy for the cameras myself. “Here we’ve been telling our young people that the real hero of tomorrow is a Thinking Man; that to meet the challenge of the future they’ve got to develop their Intellect beyond studying out how to heat before they eat, how to obey road signs, how to distinguish between rest rooms. How far do you think we’re going to get now, after the example you’ve set?” It was subvocal grumbling; no point in revealing myself to the secret service as a subversive.

  We were still bowing and smiling to the crowds lining the street, but I forgot myself long enough to swallow hard on a double take at their answer. They did not speak it, but it was clear and sharp.

  “The prevailing art forms of a culture invariably give the common denominator of its direction. In yours we find no such cultural ideal as you express.”

  It was the first thought they’d uttered Which couldn’t have been lifted bodily from the script of Git Along Doggie, or Biff Swift, Space Detective.

  And it was impersonal, emotionless—as remote from approval or rebuke as a spiral galaxy.

  There went my consistency again. Oddly, somehow, it made me feel better. At least they weren’t really what they seemed—cowboys taken from some distant world’s Western Plains, dressed up in fancy uniforms and taught to press some buttons. There was intellect behind those false fronts.

  I felt a twinge of fear. So far they had taken utmost care not to ha
rm any human life—but only so far.

  They gave me no more contact. They were much too busy playing up to the crowds lining the streets. And why? Why were they working so hard to be popular? Why were they giving us such a liberal helping of what we obviously had hoped to find in them? Or were they sampling each mind as we passed? With the same ease in sampling mine? And finding? For what were they searching?

  Too bad our scientists would all be back at the Mall, attempting to measure, guess the weight and composition of an entranceless, seamless globe. And I still wonder if their instruments told them there wasn’t anything there—or if the instruments, too, were subject to illusion.

  And I wonder, too, if the police department wasn’t secretly relieved when the ship, in mid-afternoon, suddenly disappeared; releasing the cordons of police so they could go back to their normal occupation of attempting to entice ordinary people into committing crimes so they could entrap them more conveniently.

  Now it was three o’clock in the morning. At the dinners and receptions the human males had worn their symbolic tails, the females had shown off the old dead scraps skinned from slaughtered rodents to display the hunting prowess of their males in the widows-and-orphans fleecing marts or under the graft table. The social events symbolizing the progress of a flowering civilization were over for the night. Even the stench of perfumes, so fragrant in the bottle and jar, so fetid as they oxidize and mix with sweat and decaying scales of skin, was being carried away on the cool night breeze.

  The Star Heroes lounged around in one of the more intimate reception rooms of Blair House, theirs for their stay, while they relaxed before going to bed—single beds, of course, installed under the strict supervision of F.B.I. who were doing their best to make sure these handsome, single men from the stars indulged in no nonconformist sex behavior while guests of this Earth and subject to association with government officials.