The Star

by Arthur C. Clarke

  ‘It was while he was studying the alpha, beta and other rhythms in the brain that Gilbert got interested in music. He was sure that there must be some connection between musical and mental rhythms. He’d play music at various tempos to his subjects and see what effect it had on their normal brain frequencies. As you might expect, it had a lot, and the discoveries he made led Gilbert on into more philosophical fields.

  ‘I only had one good talk with him about his theories. It was not that he was at all secretive—I’ve never met a scientist who was, come to think of it—but he didn’t like to talk about his work until he knew where it was leading. However, what he told me was enough to prove that he’d opened up a very interesting line of territory, and thereafter I made rather a point of cultivating him. My firm supplied some of his equipment, but I wasn’t averse to picking up a little profit on the side. It occurred to me that if Gilbert’s ideas worked out, he’d need a business manager before you could whistle the opening bar of the Fifth Symphony….

  ‘For what Gilbert was trying to do was to lay a scientific foundation for the theory of hit tunes. Of course, he didn’t think of it that way: he regarded it as a pure research project, and didn’t look any further ahead than a paper in the Proceedings of the Physical Society. But I spotted its financial implications at once. They were quite breath-taking.

  ‘Gilbert was sure that a great melody, or a hit tune, made its impression on the mind because in some way it fitted in with the fundamental electrical rhythms going on in the brain. One analogy he used was “It’s like a Yale key going into a lock—the two patterns have got to fit before anything happens.”

  ‘He tackled the problem from two angles. In the first place, he took hundreds of the really famous tunes in classical and popular music and analysed their structure—their morphology, as he put it. This was done automatically, in a big harmonic analyser that sorted out all the frequencies. Of course, there was a lot more to it than this, but I’m sure you’ve got the basic idea.

  ‘At the same time, he tried to see how the resulting patterns of waves agreed with the natural electrical vibrations of the brain. Because it was Gilbert’s theory—and this is where we get into rather deep philosophical waters—that all existing tunes were merely crude approximations to one fundamental melody. Musicians had been groping for it down the centuries, but they didn’t know what they were doing, because they were ignorant of the relation between music and mind. Now that this had been unravelled, it should be possible to discover the Ultimate Melody.’

  ‘Huh!’ said John Christopher. ‘It’s only a rehash of Plato’s theory of ideals. You know—all the objects of our material world are merely crude copies of the ideal chair or table or what-have-you. So your friend was after the ideal melody. And did he find it?’

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ continued Harry imperturbably. ‘It took Gilbert about a year to complete his analysis, and then he started on the synthesis. To put it crudely, he built a machine that would automatically construct patterns of sound according to the laws that he’d uncovered. He had banks of oscillators and mixers—in fact, he modified an ordinary electronic organ for this part of the apparatus—which were controlled by his composing machine. In the rather childish way that scientists like to name their offspring, Gilbert had called this device Ludwig.

  ‘Maybe it helps to understand how Ludwig operated if you think of him as a kind of kaleidoscope, working with sound rather than light. But he was a kaleidoscope set to obey certain laws, and those laws—so Gilbert believed—were based on the fundamental structure of the human mind. If he could get the adjustments correct, Ludwig would be bound, sooner or later, to arrive at the Ultimate Melody as he searched through all the possible patterns of music.

  ‘I had one opportunity of hearing Ludwig at work, and it was uncanny. The equipment was the usual nondescript mess of electronics which one meets in any lab: it might have been a mock-up of a new computer, a radar gunsight, a traffic-control system, or a ham radio. It was very hard to believe that, if it worked, it would put every composer in the world out of business. Or would it? Perhaps not: Ludwig might be able to deliver the raw material, but surely it would still have to be orchestrated.

  ‘Then the sound started to come from the speaker. At first it seemed to me that I was listening to the five-finger exercises of an accurate but completely uninspired pupil. Most of the themes were quite banal: the machine would play one, then ring the changes on it bar after bar until it had exhausted all the possibilities before going on to the next. Occasionally a quite striking phrase would come up, but on the whole I was not at all impressed.

  ‘However, Gilbert explained that this was only a trial run and that the main circuits had not yet been set up. When they were, Ludwig would be far more selective: at the moment, he was playing everything that came along—he had no sense of discrimination. When he had acquired that, then the possibilities were limitless.

  ‘That was the last time I ever saw Gilbert Lister. I had arranged to meet him at the lab about a week later, when he expected to have made substantial progress. As it happened, I was about an hour late for my appointment. And that was very lucky for me….

  ‘When I got there, they had just taken Gilbert away. His lab assistant, an old man who’d been with him for years, was sitting distraught and disconsolate among the tangled wiring of Ludwig. It took me a long time to discover what had happened, and longer still to work out the explanation.

  ‘There was no doubt of one thing. Ludwig had finally worked. The assistant had gone off to lunch while Gilbert was making the final adjustments, and when he came back an hour later the laboratory was pulsing with one long and very complex melodic phrase. Either the machine had stopped automatically at that point, or Gilbert had switched it over to REPEAT. At any rate, he had been listening, for several hundred times at least, to that same melody. When his assistant found him, he seemed to be in a trance. His eyes were open yet unseeing, his limbs rigid. Even when Ludwig was switched off, it made no difference. Gilbert was beyond help.

  ‘What had happened? Well, I suppose we should have thought of it, but it’s so easy to be wise after the event. It’s just as I said at the beginning. If a composer, working merely by rule of thumb, can produce a melody which can dominate our mind for days on end, imagine the effect of the Ultimate Melody for which Gilbert was searching! Supposing it existed—and I’m not admitting that it does—it would form an endless ring in the memory circuits of the mind. It would go round and round forever, obliterating all other thoughts. All the cloying melodies of the past would be mere ephemerae compared to it. Once it had keyed into the brain, and distorted the circling wave forms which are the physical manifestations of consciousness itself—that would be the end. And that is what happened to Gilbert.

  ‘They’ve tried shock therapy—everything. But it’s no good; the pattern has been set, and it can’t be broken. He’s lost all consciousness of the outer world, and has to be fed intravenously. He never moves or reacts to external stimuli, but sometimes, they tell me, he twitches in a peculiar way, as if he is beating time….

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no hope for him. Yet I’m not sure if his fate is a horrible one, or whether he should be envied. Perhaps, in a sense, he’s found the ultimate reality that philosophers like Plato are always talking about. I really don’t know. And sometimes I find myself wondering just what that infernal melody was like, and almost wishing that I’d been able to hear it perhaps once. There might have been some way of doing it in safety: remember how Ulysses listened to the song of the sirens and got away with it…? But there’ll never be a chance now, of course.’

  ‘I was waiting for this,’ said Charles Willis nastily. ‘I suppose the apparatus blew up, or something, so that as usual there’s no way of checking your story.’

  Harry gave him his best more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger look.

  ‘The apparatus was quite undamaged,’ he said severely. ‘What happened next was one of those completely maddening thi
ngs for which I shall never stop blaming myself. You see, I’d been too interested in Gilbert’s experiment to look after my firm’s business in the way that I should. I’m afraid he’d fallen badly behind with his payments, and when the Accounts Department discovered what had happened to him they acted quickly. I was only off for a couple of days on another job, and when I got back, do you know what had happened? They’d pushed through a court order, and had seized all their property. Of course that had meant dismantling Ludwig: when I saw him next he was just a pile of useless junk. And all because of a few pounds! It made me weep.’

  ‘I’m sure of it,’ said Eric Maine. ‘But you’ve forgotten Loose End Number Two. What about Gilbert’s assistant? He went into the lab while the gadget was going full blast. Why didn’t it get to him, too? You’ve slipped up there, Harry.’

  H. Purvis, Esquire, paused only to drain the last drops from his glass and to hand it silently across to Drew.

  ‘Really!’ he said. ‘Is this a cross-examination? I didn’t mention the point because it was rather trivial. But it explains why I was never able to get the slightest inkling of the nature of that melody. You see, Gilbert’s assistant was a first-rate lab technician, but he’d never been able to help much with the adjustments to Ludwig. For he was one of those people who are completely tone-deaf. To him, the Ultimate Melody meant no more than a couple of cats on a garden wall.’

  Nobody asked any more questions: we all, I think, felt the desire to commune with our thoughts. There was a long, brooding silence before the ‘White Hart’ resumed its usual activities. And even then, I noticed, it was every bit of ten minutes before Charlie started whistling ‘La Ronde’ again.

  The Next Tenants

  First published in Satellite, February 1957

  Collected in Tales from the White Hart

  ‘The number of mad scientists who wish to conquer the world,’ said Harry Purvis, looking thoughtfully at his beer, ‘has been grossly exaggerated. In fact, I can remember encountering only a single one.’

  ‘Then there couldn’t have been many others,’ commented Bill Temple, a little acidly. ‘It’s not the sort of thing one would be likely to forget.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ replied Harry, with that air of irrefragable innocence which is so disconcerting to his critics. ‘And, as a matter of fact, this scientist wasn’t really mad. There was no doubt, though, that he was out to conquer the world. Or if you want to be really precise—to let the world be conquered.’

  ‘And by whom?’ asked George Whitley. ‘The Martians? Or the well-known little green men from Venus?’

  ‘Neither of them. He was collaborating with someone a lot nearer home. You’ll realise who I mean when I tell you he was a myrmecologist.’

  ‘A which-what?’ asked George.

  ‘Let him get on with the story,’ said Drew, from the other side of the bar. ‘It’s past ten, and if I can’t get you all out by closing time this week, I’ll lose my licence.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Harry with dignity, handing over his glass for a refill. ‘This all happened about two years ago, when I was on a mission in the Pacific. It was rather hush-hush, but in view of what’s happened since, there’s no harm in talking about it. Three of us scientists were landed on a certain Pacific atoll not a thousand miles from Bikini, and given a week to set up some detection equipment. It was intended, of course, to keep an eye on our good friends and allies when they started playing with thermonuclear reactions—to pick some crumbs from the AEC’s table, as it were. The Russians, naturally, were doing the same thing, and occasionally we ran into each other and then both sides would pretend that there was nobody here but us chickens.

  ‘This atoll was supposed to be uninhabited, but this was a considerable error. It actually had a population of several hundred millions—’

  ‘What!’ gasped everybody.

  ‘—several hundred millions,’ continued Purvis calmly, ‘of which number, one was human. I came across him when I went inland one day to have a look at the scenery.’

  ‘Inland?’ asked George Whitley. ‘I thought you said it was an atoll. How can a ring of coral—’

  ‘It was a very plump atoll,’ said Harry firmly. ‘Anyway, who’s telling this story?’ He waited defiantly for a moment until he had the right of way again.

  ‘Here I was, then, walking up a charming little river course underneath the coconut palms, when to my great surprise I came across a water wheel—a very modern-looking one, driving a dynamo. If I’d been sensible, I suppose I’d have gone back and told my companions, but I couldn’t resist the challenge and decided to do some reconnoitering on my own. I remembered that there were still supposed to be Japanese troops around who didn’t know that the war was over, but that explanation seemed a bit unlikely.

  ‘I followed the power line up a hill, and there on the other side was a low, whitewashed building set in a large clearing. All over this clearing were tall, irregular mounds of earth, linked together with a network of wires. It was one of the most baffling sights I have ever seen, and I stood and stared for a good ten minutes, trying to decide what was going on. The longer I looked, the less sense it seemed to make.

  ‘I was debating what to do when a tall, white-haired man came out of the building and walked over to one of the mounds. He was carrying some kind of apparatus and had a pair of earphones slung around his neck, so I guessed that he was using a Geiger counter. It was just about then that I realised what those tall mounds were. They were termitaries… the skyscrapers, in comparison to their makers, far taller than the Empire State Building in which the so-called white ants live.

  ‘I watched with great interest, but complete bafflement, while the elderly scientist inserted his apparatus into the base of the termitary, listened intently for a moment, and then walked back towards the building. By this time I was so curious that I decided to make my presence known. Whatever research was going on here obviously had nothing to do with international politics, so I was the only one who’d have anything to hide. You’ll appreciate later just what a miscalculation that was.

  ‘I yelled for attention and walked down the hill, waving my arms. The stranger halted and watched me approaching: he didn’t look particularly surprised. As I came closer I saw that he had a straggling moustache that gave him a faintly Oriental appearance. He was about sixty years old, and carried himself very erect. Though he was wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, he looked so dignified that I felt rather ashamed of my noisy approach.

  ‘“Good morning,” I said apologetically. “I didn’t know that there was anyone else on this island. I’m with an—er—scientific-survey party over on the other side.”

  ‘At this the stranger’s eyes lit up. “Ah,” he said, in almost perfect English, “a fellow scientist! I’m very pleased to meet you. Come into the house.”

  ‘I followed gladly enough—I was pretty hot after my scramble—and I found that the building was simply one large lab. In a corner was a bed, and a couple of chairs, together with a stove and one of those folding washbasins that campers use. That seemed to sum up the living arrangements. But everything was very neat and tidy: my unknown friend seemed to be a recluse, but he believed in keeping up appearances.

  ‘I introduced myself first, and, as I’d hoped, he promptly responded. He was one Professor Takato, a biologist from a leading Japanese university. He didn’t look particularly Japanese, apart from the moustache I’ve mentioned. With his erect, dignified bearing he reminded me more of an old Kentucky colonel I once knew.

  ‘After he’d given me some unfamiliar but refreshing wine, we sat and talked for a couple of hours. Like most scientists he seemed happy to meet someone who would appreciate his work. It was true that my interests lay in physics and chemistry rather than on the biological side, but I found Professor Takato’s research quite fascinating.

  ‘I don’t suppose you know much about termites, so I’ll remind you of the salient facts. They’re among the most highly evolved of the social i
nsects, and live in vast colonies throughout the tropics. They can’t stand cold weather, nor, oddly enough, can they endure direct sunlight. When they have to get from one place to another, they construct little covered roadways. They seem to have some unknown and almost instantaneous means of communication, and though the individual termites are pretty helpless and dumb, a whole colony behaves like an intelligent animal. Some writers have drawn comparisons between a termitary and a human body, which is also composed of individual living cells making up an entity much higher than the basic units. The termites are often called “white ants”, but that’s a completely incorrect name, as they aren’t ants at all but quite a different species of insect. Or should I say “genus”? I’m pretty vague about this sort of thing…

  ‘Excuse this little lecture, but after I’d listened to Takato for a while I began to get quite enthusiastic about termites myself. Did you know, for example, that they not only cultivate gardens but also keep cows—insect cows, of course—and milk them? Yes, they’re sophisticated little devils, even though they do it all by instinct.

  ‘But I’d better tell you something about the Professor. Although he was alone at the moment, and had lived on the island for several years, he had a number of assistants who brought equipment from Japan and helped him in his work. His first great achievement was to do for the termites what von Frisch had done with bees—he’d learned their language. It was much more complex than the system of communication that bees use, which as you probably know, is based on dancing. I understood that the network of wires linking the termitaries to the lab not only enabled Professor Takato to listen to the termites talking among each other, but also permitted him to speak to them. That’s not really as fantastic as it sounds, if you use the word “speak” in its widest sense. We speak to a good many animals—not always with our voices, by any means. When you throw a stick for your dog and expect him to run and fetch it, that’s a form of speech—sign language. The Professor, I gathered, had worked out some kind of code which the termites understood, though how efficient it was at communicating ideas I didn’t know.