The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

So I left the room—ostensibly to look in on Benedetto, actually to cool off a little. Benedetto seemed fine—that is, the dressings were still in place, he had not moved, his breath and pulse were slow and regular. I took my time before I went back to the room where Zorchi still sat waiting.

  He had taken advantage of the time to improve his mind. The man’s curiosity was insatiable; the more he denied it, the more it stuck out all over him. He had thrown the Handbook on the floor when I gave it to him, but as soon as I was out of sight he was leafing through it. He had it open on his lap, face down, as he faced me.

  “Weels.” There was, for once, no sardonic rasp to his voice. And his face, I saw, was bone-white. “Weels, permit me to be sure I understand you. It is your belief that this intelligent plan of seeding the world with poison to make it well will succeed, because you believe that a Signore Carmody will evict Defoe from power?”

  I said, “Well, not exactly—”

  “But almost exactly? That is, you require this Millen Carmody for your plan?”

  “It wasn’t my plan. But you’re right about the other.”

  “Very good.” He extended the Handbook to me. “There is here a picture which calls itself Millen Carmody. Is that the man?”

  I glanced at the familiar warm eyes on the frontispiece. “That’s right. Have you seen him?”

  “I have, indeed.” The shaggy beard was twitching—I did not know whether with laughter or the coming of tears. “I saw him not long ago, Weels. It was in what they call Bay 100—you remember? He was in a little bag like the pasta one carries home from a store. He was quite sound asleep, Weels, in the shelf just below the one I woke up in.”

  CHAPTER XVI

  So now at last I knew why Millen Carmody had permitted Defoe to turn the Company into a prison cell for the world. He couldn’t forbid it, because the dead can forbid nothing, and Carmody was sleeping with the dead. No wonder Defoe was so concerned with the Naples sector!

  How long? How long had Carmody been quietly out of the way, while Defoe made his plans and took his steps, and someone in a little room somewhere confected “statements” with Millen Carmody’s signature on them and “interviews” that involved only one man?

  It could not have been less than five or six years, I thought, counting back to the time when Defoe’s name first began to register with me as an ordinary citizen, before I had married his cousin. Six years. That was the date of the Prague-Vienna war. And the year following, Hanoi clashed with Cebu. And the year after that, Auckland and Adelaide.

  What in God’s name was Defoe’s plan? Nothing as simple as putting Carmody out of the way so that he could loot the Company. No man could wish to be that rich! It was meaningless…

  Defoe could be playing for only one thing—power.

  But it didn’t matter; all that mattered was that now I knew that Carmody was an enemy to Defoe. He was therefore an ally to Rena and to me, and we needed allies. But how might we get Carmody out of Bay 100?

  There weren’t any good answers, though Rena and I, with the help of grumbling comments from Zorchi, debated it until the morning light began to shine. Frontal assault on the clinic was ridiculous. Even a diversionary raid such as Rena had staged to try to rescue her father—only ten days before!—would hardly get us in through the triple-locked door of Bay 100. Even if Slovetski’s movement had still been able to muster the strength to do it, which was not likely.

  It was maddening. I had hidden the hypodermic Rena had brought in Bay 100 to get it out of the way. Undoubtedly it was there still—perhaps only a few yards from Millen Carmody. If fifty cubic centimeters of a watery purplish liquid could have been plucked from the little glass bottle and moved the mere inches to the veins of his arms, the problem would be solved—for he could open the door from inside as easily as Zorchi had, and certainly once he was that far we could manage to get him out.

  But the thing was impossible, no matter how we looked at it.

  * * * *

  I suppose I fell asleep sitting in that chair, because I woke up in it. It was in the middle of a crazy nightmare about an avenging angel with cobalt-blue eyes burning at me out of heaven; and I wanted to run from him, but I was frozen by a little man with a hypodermic of ice. I woke up, and I was facing the television set. Someone—Rena, I suppose—had covered me with a light spread. The set was blaring a strident tenor voice. Zorchi was hunched over, watching some opera; I might as well have been a thousand miles away.

  I lay blearily watching the tiny figures flickering around the screen, not so much forgetting all the things that were on my mind as knowing what they were and that they existed, but lacking the strength to pick them up and look at them. The opera seemed to concern an Egyptian queen and a priest of some sort; I was not very interested in it, though it seemed odd that Zorchi should watch it so eagerly.

  Perhaps, after all, there was something to his maudlin self-pity—perhaps I really did think of him as a monster or a dog, for I was as uneasy to see him watching an opera as I would have been to see an ape play the flute.

  I heard trucks going by on the highway. By and by it began to penetrate through the haze that I was hearing a lot of trucks going by on the highway. I had no idea how heavily traveled the Naples-Caserta road might be, but from the sound, they seemed nearly bumper to bumper, whizzing along at seventy or eighty miles an hour.

  I got up stiffly and walked over to the window.

  I had not been far wrong. There was a steady stream of traffic in both directions—not only trucks but buses and private cars, everything from late-model gyromaxions to ancient piston-driven farm trucks.

  Zorchi heard me move, and turned toward me with a hooded expression. I pointed to the window.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  He said levelly, “The end of the world. It is now official; it has been on the television. Oh, they do not say it in just so many words, but it is there.”

  I turned to the television set and flicked off the tape-relay switch—apparently the opera had been recorded. Zorchi glared, but didn’t try to stop me as I hunted on the broadcast bands for a news announcer.

  I didn’t have far to hunt. Every channel was the same: The Company was issuing orders and instructions. Every man, woman and child was to be ready within ten days for commitment to the clinic…

  I tried to imagine the scenes of panic and turmoil that would be going on in downtown Naples at that moment.

  * * * *

  The newscaster was saying: “Remember, if your Basic Blue Bolt policy number begins with the letters A, B or C—if it begins with the letters A, B or C—you are to report to the local first aid or emergency post at six hundred hours tomorrow. There is no danger. I repeat, there is no danger. This is merely a precaution taken by the Company for your protection.” He didn’t really look as though there were no danger, however. He looked like a man confronted by a ghost.

  I switched to another channel. An equally harried-looking announcer: “—reported by a team of four physicists from the Royal University to have produced a serious concentration of radioactive byproducts in the upper atmosphere. It is hoped that the cloud of dangerous gases will veer southward and pass harmlessly through the Eastern Mediterranean; however, strictly as a precautionary measure, it is essential that every person in this area be placed in a safety zone during the danger period, the peak of which is estimated to come within the next fourteen days. If there is any damage, it will be only local and confined to livestock—for which you will be reimbursed under your Blue Bolt coverage.”

  I switched to another channel. Local damage! Local to the face of the Earth!

  I tried all the channels; they were all the same.

  The Company had evidently decided to lie to the human race. Keep them in the dark—make each little section believe that only it was affected—persuade them that they would be under for, at most, a few weeks or months.

  Was that, I wondered, Defoe’s scheme? Was he planning to try somehow to convince four bil
lion people that fifty years were only a few weeks? It would never work—the first astronomer to look at a star, the first seaman to discover impossible errors in his tide table, would spot the lie.

  More likely he was simply proceeding along what must always have been his basic assumption: The truth is wasted on the people.

  Zorchi said with heavy irony, “If my guest is quite finished with the instrument, perhaps he will be gracious enough to permit me to resume Aïda.”

  * * * *

  I woke Rena and told her about the evacuation. She said, yawning, “But of course, Tom. What else could they do?” And she began discussing breakfast.

  I went with her, but not to eat; in the dining hall was a small television set, and on it I could listen to the same repeat broadcasts over and over to my heart’s content. It was—in a way—a thrilling sight. It is always impressive to see a giant machine in operation, and there was no machine bigger than the Company.

  The idea of suspending a whole world, even piecemeal, was staggering. But if there had been panic at first in the offices of the Company, none of it showed. The announcers were harried and there was bustle and strain, but order presided.

  Those long lines of vehicles outside the window; they were going somewhere; they were each one, I could see by the medallion slung across each radiator front, on the payroll of the Company.

  Perhaps the trick of pretending to each section that only it would be affected was wise—I don’t know. It was working, and I suppose that is the touchstone of wisdom. Naples knew that something was going on in Rome, of course, but was doubtful about the Milanese Republic. The Romans were in no doubt at all about Milan, but weren’t sure about the Duchy of Monaco, down the Riviera shore. And the man on the street, if he gave it a thought at all, must have been sure that such faraway places as America and China were escaping entirely.

  I suppose it was clever—there was no apparent panic. The trick took away the psychological horror of world catastrophe and replaced it with only a local terror, no different in kind than an earthquake or a flood. And there was always the sack of gold at the end of every catastrophe: Blue Bolt would pay for damage, with a free and uncounting hand.

  Except that this time, of course, Blue Bolt would not, could not, pay at all.

  * * * *

  By noon, Benedetto was out of bed.

  He shouldn’t have been, but he was conscious and we could not make him stay put—short of chains.

  He watched the television and then listened as Rena and I brought him up to date. Like me, he was shocked and then encouraged to find that Millen Carmody was in the vaults—encouraged because it was at least a handle for us to grasp the problem with; if we could get at Carmody, perhaps we could break Defoe’s usurped power. Without him, Defoe would simply use the years while the world slept to forge a permanent dictatorship.

  We got the old man to lie down, and left him. But not for long. Within the hour he came tottering to where we were sitting, staring at the television. He waved aside Rena’s quick protest.

  “There is no time for rest, my daughter,” he said. “Do not scold me. I have a task.”

  Rena said worriedly, “Dear, you must stay in bed. The doctor said—”

  “The doctor,” Benedetto said formally, “is a fool. Shall I allow us to die here? Am I an ancient idiot, or am I Benedetto dell’Angela who with Slovetski led twenty thousand men?”

  Rena said, “Please! You’re sick!”

  “Enough.” Benedetto wavered, but stood erect. “I have telephoned. I have learned a great deal. The movement—” he leaned against the wall for support—“was not planned by fools. We knew there might be bad days; we do not collapse because a few of us are put out of service by the Company. I have certain emergency numbers to call; I call them. And I find—” he paused dramatically—“that there is news. Slovetski has escaped!”

  I said, “That’s impossible! Defoe wouldn’t let him go!”

  “Perhaps Slovetski did not consult him,” Benedetto said with dignity. “At any rate, he is free and not far from here. And he is the answer we have sought, you understand.”

  “How?” I demanded. “What can he do that we can’t?”

  Benedetto smiled indulgently, though the smile was strained. His wound must have been giving him hell; it had had just enough time to stiffen up. He said, “Leave that to Slovetski, Thomas. It is his métier, not yours. I shall go to him now.”

  Well, I did what I could; but Benedetto was an iron-necked old man. I forbade him to leave and he laughed at me. I begged him to stay and he thanked me—and refused. Finally I abandoned him to Rena and Zorchi.

  Zorchi gave up almost at once. “A majestic man!” he said admiringly, as he rolled into the room where I was waiting, on his little power cart. “One cannot reason with him.”

  And Rena, in time, gave up, too. But not easily. She was weeping when she rejoined me.

  * * * *

  She had been unable even to get him to let her join him, or to consider taking someone else with him; he said it was his job alone. She didn’t even know where he was going. He had said it was not permissible, in so critical a situation, for him to tell where Slovetski was.

  Zorchi coughed. “As to that,” he said, “I have already taken the liberty of instructing one of my associates to be ready. If the Signore has gone to meet Slovetski, my man is following him…”

  So we waited, while the television announcers grew more and more grim-lipped and imperative.

  I listened with only half my mind. Part of my thoughts were with Benedetto, who should have been in a hospital instead of wandering around on some dangerous mission. And partly I was still filled with the spectacle that was unfolding before us.

  It was not merely a matter of preserving human lives. It was almost as important to provide the newly awakened men and women, fifty years from now, with food to eat and the homes and tools and other things that would be needed.

  Factories and transportation gear—according to the telecasts—were being shut down and sealed to stand up under the time that would pass—“weeks,” according to the telecast, but who needed to seal a tool in oil for a few weeks? Instructions were coming hourly over the air on what should be protected in each home, and how it was to be done. Probably even fifty years would not seriously damage most of the world’s equipment—if the plans we heard on the air could be efficiently carried out.

  But the farms were another matter. The preserving of seeds was routine, but I couldn’t help wondering what these flat Italian fields would look like in fifty untended years. Would the radiocobalt sterilize even the weeds? I didn’t think so, but I didn’t know. If not, would the Italian peninsula once again find itself covered with the dense forests that Caesar had marched through, where Spartacus and his runaway slaves had lurked and struck out against the Senators?

  And how many millions would die while the forests were being cleared off the face of the Earth again to make way for grain? Synthetic foods and food from the sea might solve that—the Company could find a way. But what about the mines—three, four and five thousand feet down—when the pumps were shut off and the underground water seeped in? What about the rails that the trains rode on? You could cosmoline the engines, perhaps, but how could you protect a million miles of track from the rains of fifty years?

  So I sat there, watching the television and waiting. Rena was too nervous to stay in one place. Zorchi had mysterious occupations of his own. I sat and stared at the cathode screen.

  Until the door opened behind me, and I turned to look.

  Rena was standing there. Her face was an ivory mask. She clutched the door as her father had a few hours before; I think she looked weaker and sicker than he.

  I said, for the first time, “Darling!” She stood silent, staring at me. I asked apprehensively, “What is it?”

  The pale lips opened, but it was a moment before she could frame the words. Then her voice was hard to hear. “My father,” she said. “He reached the pla
ce where he was meeting Slovetski, but the expediters were there before him. They shot him down in the street. And they are on their way here.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  It was quick and brutal. Somehow Benedetto had been betrayed; the expediters had known where he had come from. And that was the end of that.

  They came swarming down on us in waves, at least a hundred of them, to capture a man, a girl and a cripple—Zorchi’s servants had deserted us, melting into the hemp fields like roaches into a garbage dump. Zorchi had a little gun, a Beretta; he fired it once and wounded a man.

  The rest was short and unpleasant.

  They bound us and gagged us and flew us, trussed like game for the spit, to the clinic. I caught a glimpse of milling mobs outside the long, low walls as we came down. Then all I could see was the roof of the copter garage.

  We were brought to a tiny room where Defoe sat at a desk. The Underwriter was smiling. “Hello, Thomas,” he said, his eyes studying the bruise on my cheek. He turned toward Rena consideringly. “So this is your choice, eh, Thomas?” He studied Rena coolly. “Hardly my type. Still, by sticking with me, you could have had a harem.”

  Bound as I was, I started forward. Something hit me in the back at my first step, driving a hot rush of agony up from my kidneys. Defoe watched me catch my breath without a change of expression.

  “My men are quite alert, Thomas. Please do not try that again. Once is amusing, but twice would annoy me.” He sighed. “I seem to have been wrong about you, Thomas. Perhaps because I needed someone’s help, I overestimated you. I thought long ago that beneath your conditioning you had brains. Manning is a machine, good for taking orders. Dr. Lawton is loyal, but not intelligent. And between loyalty and intelligence, I’ll take brains. Loyalty I can provide for myself.” He nodded gravely at the armed expediters.

  Zorchi spat. “Kill us, butcher,” he ordered. “It is enough I die without listening to your foolish babbling.”

  Defoe considered him. “You interest me, Signore. A surprise, finding you revived and with Wills. Before we’re finished, you must tell me about that.”