The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Science Fiction Stories

by Arthur C. Clarke

Dawn light lay a-slant the crater’s ridge. Argo pointed down the opposite slope. A black temple was visible at the bottom among trees and lawns. “There is Hama’s temple,” Argo said. “You have your task. Good luck.”

  They started down the incline of cinders. It took them an hour to reach the first trees that surrounded the dark buildings and the great gardens. Entering on the first lip of grass, they heard a sudden cluster of notes from one of the trees.

  “A bird,” Iimmi said. “I haven’t heard one of those since I left Leptar.”

  Suddenly, bright blue and the length of a man’s forefinger, a lizard ran halfway down the trunk of the tree. It’s sapphire belly heaved in the early light with indrawn breath; then it opened its red mouth, its throat warbled, and there was another burst of music.

  “Oh well,” said Iimmi. “I was close.”

  They walked further, until Iimmi mused, “I wonder why you always think things are going to turn out like you expect.”

  “Because when something sounds like that,” declared Urson, “it usually is a bird!” Suddenly he gave a little shiver. “Lizards,” he said.

  “It was a pretty lizard,” said Iimmi.

  “Going around expecting things to be what they seem can get you in trouble—especially on this island,” Geo commented.

  The angle at which they walked made one of the clumps of tree before them seem to fall apart. A man standing in the center raised his hand and said briskly, “Stop!”

  They stopped.

  He wore dark robes, and his short white hair made a close helmet above his brown face.

  Urson’s hand was on his sword. Snake stood with his feet wide, his hands out from his sides.

  “Who are you?” the dark man declared.

  “Who are you?” Urson parried.

  “I am Hama Incarnate.”

  They were silent. Finally Geo said, “We are travelers in Aptor. We don’t mean any harm.”

  As the man moved forward, splotches of light from the trees slipped across his robe. “Come with me,” Hama said. He turned and proceeded among the trees. They followed.

  They passed into the temple garden. It was early enough in the morning so that the sunlight lapped pink tongues over the giant black urns that sat along the edges of the path. Now they passed into the temple.

  As they passed, Hama turned, looked at the jewels on Iimmi’s and Geo’s necks, and then looked up at the gazing eye of the statue at the end of the altar. He made no other sign, but turned again and continued. “The morning rites have not yet started,” he said. “They will begin in a half an hour. By then I hope to have divined your purpose in coming here.”

  At the other side of the stairway they mounted a stairway, and then entered a door above which was a black circle dotted with three eyes. Just as they were about to go in, Geo looked around, frowned, and caught Iimmi’s eye. “Snake?” he mouthed.

  Iimmi looked around and shrugged.

  The man turned and faced them, apparently unaware of Snake’s departure. As he closed the door, now, he said, “You have come to oppose the forces of Aptor, am I right? You come to steal the jewel of Hama. You have come to kidnap the Incarnate Argo. Is that not your purpose. Keep your hand off your sword, Urson! I can kill you in a moment. You are defenseless.”

  * * * *

  “Damn! I’m sleepy.” She rolled over and cuddled the pillow. Then she opened her eyes, one at a time, and lay watching the nearly completed motor of metal bars and copper wire that sat on the table beside her bed. She stood up.

  Then she collapsed on the bed and jammed her feet under the covers again. With thirty feet of one and a half inch brass pipe, she mused sleepily, I could carry heat from the main hot-water line under the floor which I would estimate to be about the proper surface area to keep these stones warm; let me see, thirty feet of one and a half inch pipe have a surface area of 22/7 times 3/2 times 30 which is 990 divided by 7 which is… Then she caught herself. Damn, you’re thinking this to avoid thinking about getting up. She opened her eyes once more, put feet on the stone, and held them there while she scratched vigorously at her uneven mop of red hair.

  She looked at the clock. “Yikes!” she said softly, and ran out the door, and slammed it behind her—almost. She whirled around, caught it on her palms before it banged shut, and then closed it with gingerly care the final centimeter and a half of the arc. Are you trying to get caught? she asked herself as she tiptoed to the next door.

  She opened it and looked in. Dunderhead looks cute when he’s asleep, she thought. There was a cord on the floor that ran from under the table by the priest’s bed, over the stones, carefully following the zigzag of the crevices between them, and at last the end lay in the corner of the door sill. You really couldn’t see it if you weren’t looking for it, which had more or less been the idea when she had put it there last night before the priests had come back from vespers. The far end was tied in a knot of her own invention to the electric plug of his alarm clock. Dunderhead had an annoying habit of re-setting his clock every evening making sure that the red second hand was still sweeping away the minutes. (In her plans for this morning she had catalogued his every habitual action, and had observed this one for three nights running, hanging upside down from the bulky stone portcullis above and outside his window.)

  Tugging on the string, she saw it leap from the crevices into a straight line and then lift from the floor as she drew it tauter, and then go slack as the plug blipped quietly onto the floor.

  Next she pulled the string again until the slack left and raised her end a few inches from the floor. With her free hand now she gave the string a small twit and watched the vibration run up and down the string twice. The knot’s invention was an ingenuous one. At the vibration, two opposed loops shook away from a third, and a four millimeter length of rubber band that had been sewn in tautened and released a fourth loop from around a small length of number four gauge wire with a holding tonsure of three quarters of a gram, and the opposing vibration returning up the thread loosed a similar apparatus on the other side of the plug. The knot fell away, and she wound it quickly around her hand. She stood up, closed the door, and the oiled lock was perfectly silent. The door knob was just the slightest bit greasy, she noted. Careless.

  Back in her room, it was standing on the table. Sunlight from the high window fell red across the board. It was very early in the morning. She took the parts of the motor up in her hands. “I guess we try you out today? No?” She answered herself, “Yes.” Finally she put the parts in the paper bag, strode out of the room, and slammed the…whirled around and caught it once more. “Gnnnnnnn,” she said. “Do you want to get caught?” For the second time she answered herself, “Yes. And remember that too. Or you’ll never get through it.”

  As she walked down the hall, she heard through one of the windows the chirp of a blue lizard from the garden. “The sound I wanted to hear,” she smiled to herself. “A good sign.”

  Turning into the temple, she started down the side aisle. The great black columns passed before her. Something moved between the columns along the other side, swift and indistinct as a bird’s shadow. At least she thought she saw something. “Remember,” she reminded herself, “you have guilt feelings about this whole thing, and you could very easily be manufacturing delusions to scare yourself out of going through with it.” She went on, passed two more columns, and saw it again. “Or,” she went on with her monologue, “you could be purposefully ignoring the very obvious fact that there is somebody over there who is going to see you. So watch it.” There were mirrors somewhere in the temple, but they weren’t on the opposite wall, so she couldn’t be seeing herself. In fact the mirrors were out in the vestibule through which she had come and maybe this other person had come, so maybe it was seeing her as a reflection of…“Unscramble that syntax,” she told herself. “You think like that and you’ll never make it.”

  But there was somebody, with no clothes on (for all practical purposes) sneaking between the pilla
rs. And he had four arms. That made her start to think of something else, but the thought as it arrowed into the past, suddenly got deflected, turned completely about, and jammed into her brain again, because he was staring directly at her.

  If he starts walking toward me, she thought, I’m going to be scared out of my ears. So I better start walking toward him. Besides, I want to see what he looks like. She started out from the columns. Glancing quickly both ways, she saw that the temple was deserted save for them.

  He’s a kid, she thought, three quarters of the way across. My age, she added, and again a foreign thought attempted to intrude itself on her but never made it, because he was coming toward her now. At last he stopped before her, silent, muscles like tight wire under the brown skin, black hair massing low on his forehead, his eyes deep beneath the black shrub of brows.

  She gulped and asked him, “What are you doing here? Do you know somebody could catch you in here and get mad as hell? I know I couldn’t possibly have, but I think I’ve seen you before some place; if somebody comes along, they might even think you were trying to steal Hama’s eye.” I shouldn’t have said that, she thought, because he moved funny. “You better get out of here because everybody will be up here in a half an hour for morning services.”

  At that news, he suddenly darted forward, passed her, and sprinted down toward the altar.

  “Hey!” she called and ran after him.

  Snake vaulted over the brass altar rail.

  “Wait a minute,” she called, catching up. “Wait, will you!”

  Snake turned as she slung her leg across the brass bar. “Look, I realize I gave away my hand. But that was only guilt feelings. You gave yours away too, though. And if you don’t think you’ve got guilt feelings, boy, you’re crazy.”

  Snake frowned, tilted his head, and then grinned.

  “So we’ll help each other see,” she said. “You want it too, don’t you.” She pointed up to the head of the statue towering above them. “So let’s co-operate. I’ll get it for a little while. Then you can have it.” He was listening, she saw, so she guessed her strategy was working. Play it by ear now, she thought. “We’ll help each other. Shake on it, huh?” She stuck out her hand.

  All four hands reached forward.

  Whoops, she thought, I hope he’s not offended.

  But the four hands grasped hers, and she added her second to the juncture. “All right,” she said. “Come on. Now I had all this figured out last night. And we don’t have much time. Let’s go around…” But he walked over to where the stalks of wheat spired from the altar base up through Hama’s fist, and grabbed a stalk with the three hands, and hand, over hand, over hand, began to hoist himself up to where the first broad sheets of metal leaves leaned out to form a small platform. At first his dirty feet swung out frog-like, but then he caught the stem with his toes and at last hoisted himself to the front and looked down at her.

  “I can’t climb up there,” she said, “I don’t have your elevation power.”

  Snake looked down and shrugged.

  “Oh damn,” she said. “I’ll do it my way.” She ran across the altar to the great foot of the statue. Sitting cross-legged, Hama’s foot was on his side. Using the ridges made by the toes as steps, she clammered up to the dark bulge of the deity’s godlike bunion. She made her way across the ankle, up the slanting shin, back down the black thigh, until she stood at the crevice where the leg and torso met.

  Out beyond the great knee, Snake regarded her from his perch in the groin of yellow leaf. They were about equal height.

  “Yoo-hoo,” she waved. “Meet you at the clavicle.” Then she stuck her tongue out. The bulges in the belly of the god made a treacherous ledge along which she inched until she arrived at the cavernous naval, leaving wet handprints on the black stone.

  The god’s belly button from this intimate distance revealed itself as a circular door about five feet in diameter and controlled by a combination lock. She missed the first number twice, dried her hands off, and began again. According to the plans in the main safe of the temple (on which she had first practiced combination breaking) there was a ladder behind this door which led up into the statue. She remembered it clearly; and saved her life by doing so.

  Because when she caught the second number, reversed the direction and felt the telltale click of the third, she pulled on the handle and was almost pushed from the ledge by the swinging circular door. She grabbed at a handle that she hardly saw on the door’s inside, just as the stone slipped from beneath her feet. Then she was hanging five feet out in the air over the sacred groin some fifty feet below.

  The first thing she tried, after closing her eyes and mumbling a few laws of motion, was to swing the door to. When she swung out, however, the door swung closed; and when she swung in, the door swung opened. After a while, she just hung. She gave small thanks that she had dried her hands. When her arms began to ache, she wished that she hadn’t, because then it would be over by now. She went over what she knew about taking judo falls.

  Then the door swung closed, and someone grabbed her around the waist. She didn’t open her eyes, but felt her body pressed against the tilting stone. Her arms fell tingling to her sides. The ligaments flamed with pain. Then the pain dulled to throbbing, and she opened her eyes. “How the hell did you get down here?” she asked Snake. With his help she staggered through the open door and stopped to rub her arms. “How did you know about the ladder?”

  They were standing in the shaft now, with the ladder beside them running up into the darkness.

  He looked at her with a puzzled expression.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Oh, I’ll be able to climb up there, never you worry. Hey, can you speak?”

  Snake shook his head.

  “Oh,” she said. Something started at the edge of her mind again, a picture of something unpleasant. Snake had started up the ladder, which he had come down so quickly a minute ago. She glanced out the door, saw that the temple was empty, pulled the door to, and followed.

  They ascended into complete darkness. Her arms were beginning to ache again, just slightly. She reached up for the next rung, and found it in its proper place. Then the next. And then again the next.

  She started counting steps now, and when seventy-four, seventy-five, and seventy-six dropped below her, there was a missing rung. She reached above it, but there was none. She ran her hand up the edge of the ladder and found that it suddenly curved into the wall. “Hey, you,” she said in the darkness.

  Something touched her waist. “Gnnnnnggggg,” she said. “Don’t do that.” It touched her on the leg, took hold of her ankle, and pulled. “Watch out,” she said.

  It pulled again. She raised her foot, and it was tugged sideways a good foot and a half and set on solid flooring. Then a hand (her foot was not released) took her arm, and another held her waist, and tugged. She stiffened for one instant before she remembered the number of limbs her companion had. Then she came off the ladder, sideways into the dark, afraid to put her other foot down lest she step headlong into the seventy-five foot plus shaft.

  But he tugged again, and in losing her balance, her foot came down on cool, solid stone. Holding her arm now, he led her along the tunnel. They passed into a steep incline. Now down the upper arm, she recalled.

  “I feel like Eurydice,” she said aloud.

  You…funny… an echoing voice sounded in her skull.

  “Hey,” she said. “What was that?” But the voice was silent. The wall turned abruptly and the floor leveled out. They were in a section of the passage now that corresponded roughly to the statue’s radial artery. At the wrist, there was a light. They mounted a stairway, came out a trap door, and found themselves standing high in the temple. Below them the great room spread, vastly deep, and still empty. Beside them, the stems of the bronze wheat stalks rose up through the fist and spired another fifty feet before breaking into clusters of golden grain and leaves. Across from them, over the dark curve of Gargantuan chest, in t
he statue’s other hand, the shaft of the scythe leaned away into shadow.

  “Look,” she said. “You follow me now.” She started back along the top of the forearm and then began the tedious climb over the rippling biceps, till at last they reached the broad shoulder. They walked across the hollow above the collar bone until they stood just below the great scooping shell of the ear.

  She took the paper bag she had stuffed into her belt, tied one end of the string around the neck, and then, holding the other, she heaved the bag up and over the ear. She got the other end of the string, knotted it as high as she could reach, and gave it a tug. “I hope this works,” she said. “I had it all figured out yesterday. The tensile strength of this stuff is about two hundred and fifty pounds, which ought to do for you and me.” She planted her foot on the swell of the neck tendon, and in seven leaps she made it to the lobe of the ear. She swung around into the hollow, using the frontal wing as a pivot. Crouching in the hollow trumpet, she looked down at Snake. “Come up,” she said. “Hurry up.”

  Snake joined her a moment later.

  The ear was hollow, too. It led back into a cylindrical chamber which went up through the head of the god. The architect who had designed the statue had conveniently left the god’s lid flipped. They climbed the ladder and emerged amid the tangle of pipes which represented the hair of the god. They made their way forward through the mass of pipes to where the forehead sloped dangerously forward. They could see the foreshortened nose and the rim of the statue’s middle eye above that. There wasn’t much of anything after that for the next thousand feet until the base of the altar. “Now you can really be some help,” she told him. “Hold on to my wrist and let me down. I’ll get the jewel.”

  They grabbed wrists, and Snake’s three other hands, as well as the joints of his knees, locked around the base of five pipes that sprouted around them.

  Slowly she slid forward, until her free hand slipped on the stone and she dropped the length of their two arms and swung just above the statue’s nose. The eye opened in front of her. The lid arced above her, and the white of either side of the ebony iris shone faintly in the half darkness. At the center of the iris, in a small hollow, sitting on the top of a metal support, was the jewel.