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

by Arthur C. Clarke

  She reached her free hand toward it as she swung.

  From somewhere a gong suddenly sounded. Light flooded over her. Looking up, she saw white sockets of light shining down into her own eyes. Panicking, she almost released Snake’s wrist. But a voice in her head (hers or someone else’s, she couldn’t tell) rang out. Hold…on…damn…it…

  Then she grabbed the jewel. The metal shaft in which the jewel had stood was not steady, and tilted as her hand came away from it. The tilting must have set off some clockwork mechanism, because the great eyelid was slowly lowering over the ivory and ebony eye. She swung again at the end of the rope of bone and flesh; half blinded by the lights above her, she looked over her shoulder, into the temple below. There was singing, the beginning of a processional hymn. The morning rites had started!

  Light glinted on the stone limbs of the god. Figures were pouring into the temple. They must have seen her, but the hymn, sonorous and gigantic, rose like flood water, and she suddenly thought that if she fell, she would drown in the sound of it.

  Snake was pulling her up. Stone against her arm, against her cheek. She clenched her other fist tightly at her side. Another hand came down and helped pull her. Then another. Then she was lying among the metal pipes, and he was loosening her fingers from his wrist. He tugged her to her feet, and for a moment she was looking out over the now filled temple.

  Nervous energy contracted coldly along her body, and the sudden sight of the great drop filled her eyes and her head, and she staggered. Snake caught her and at last helped her back to the ladder. “We’ve got it,” she said to him before they started down. She breathed deeply. Then she checked in her palm to see if it was still there; it was, and again she looked out over the people below. Light on the up-turned faces made them look like scattered pearls on the dark floor. An exaltation suddenly burst in her shoulders, flooded her legs and arms and for a moment washed the pain away. Snake, with one hand on her shoulder, was grinning also. “We’ve got it!” she said again.

  They went down the ladder into the statue’s skull. Snake preceded her out the hollow ear. He reached around, caught the cord, and let himself down to the shoulder.

  She hesitated for a moment, then put the jewel in her mouth, and followed him. Standing beside him once more, she removed it, and then rubbed her shoulders. “Boy, am I going to have some Charley horse by tomorrow,” she said. “Do me a favor and untie my bag for me?”

  Snake untied the parcel from the end of the cord, and together now they climbed down the bicep and back over the forearm to the trap door in the wrist.

  She glanced down at the faces of the worshipers just before they disappeared into the tunnel. Snake was taking the jewel from her hand. She let him have it, and watched him raise it up above his head.

  Immediately, when he raised the jewel, the pearls of faces went out like extinguished flames as heads bent all through the temple.

  “That’s the ticket,” grinned Argo. “Come on.” But Snake did not go into the tunnel. Instead he walked around the fist, took hold of one of the bronze wheat stems, and slid down through an opening between the thumb and forefinger. “That way?” asked Argo. “Oh well, I guess so. You know I’m going to write an epic about this.”

  But Snake had already gone. She followed him, clutching her feet around a great bunch of stems. He was waiting for her at the plateau of leaves, and nestled there, they gazed out once more at the fascinated congregation.

  Again Snake held aloft the jewel, and again heads bowed. The hymn began to repeat itself, the individual words lost in the sonority of the hall. They started down the last length of stems now, coming quickly. When they stood at last on the base, she put her hand on his shoulder and looked across the brass altar rail. The congregation pressed close, although she did not recognize an individual face. Yet a mass of people stood there, enormous and familiar. As Snake started forward, holding up the jewel, the people fell back from the rail. Snake climbed over the altar rail, and then helped her over.

  Her shoulders were beginning to hurt now, and the enormity of the theft ran chills up and down, up and down her spine. The black marble altar step as she put her foot down was awfully cold.

  They started forward again, and the last note of the hymn echoed to silence, filling the hall with the roaring quiet of the hushed breathing of hundreds.

  Simultaneously, both she and Snake got the urge to look back at the great diminishing height of Hama behind them. All three eyes were shut firmly now. A quiet composed of the rustling of a hundred dark robes upon another hundred hissed about them as they started forward again.

  There was a spotlight on them, she suddenly realized. That was why the people, hovering back from the circular effulgence over the floor around them seemed so dim. Her heart had become a pulse at the bottom of her tongue. They kept on going forward, into the shadowed faces, into the parting sea of dark cloaks and hoods.

  Then the last of the figures stepped aside from the temple door, and she could see the sunlight out in the garden. They stood still for a moment, Snake holding high the jewel; then they burst forward, out through the door and down over the bright steps.

  Instantly the hymn began again behind them, as if their departure had been a signal. The music flooded after them, and when they reached the bottom step, they both whirled, crouching like animals, expecting the congregation to come welling darkly out after them. But there was only the music, flowing into the light, washing around them, a transparent river, a sea.

  “Freeze the drop in the hand,

  and break the earth with singing.

  Hail the height of a man,

  and also the height of a woman.”

  Over the music came a brittle chirping from the trees. Fixed with fear, they watched the temple door as the hymn progressed. Then Snake suddenly stood up straight and grinned.

  She scratched her red hair, shifted her weight, and looked at Snake. “I guess they’re not coming,” she said, sounding almost disappointed. Then she giggled. “Well, I guess we got it.”

  * * * *

  “Don’t move,” repeated Hama Incarnate.

  “Now look—” began Urson.

  “You are perfectly safe,” the god continued, “unless you do anything foolish. You have shown great wisdom. Continue to show it. I have a lot to explain to you.”

  “Like what?” asked Geo.

  “I’ll start with the lizards,” smiled the god.

  “The what?” asked Iimmi.

  “The singing lizards,” said Hama. “You walked through a grove of trees just a few minutes ago. You had just been through a series of happenings that was probably the most frightening in your life. Suddenly you heard a singing in the trees. What was it?”

  “I thought it was a bird,” Iimmi said.

  “But why a bird?” asked the god.

  “Because that’s what a bird sounds like,” stated Urson impatiently. “Who needs an old lizard singing to them on a morning like this?”

  “Your second point is much better than your first,” said the god. “You do not need a lizard, but you did need a bird. A bird means spring, life, good luck, cheerfulness. You think of a bird singing and you think of thoughts that men have been thinking for thousands upon thousands of years. Poets have written of it in every language, Catullus in Latin, Keats in English, Li Po in Chinese, Darnel X24 in New English. You expected a bird because after what you had been through, you needed to hear a bird. Lizards run from under wet rocks, scurry over gravestones. A lizard is not what you needed.”

  “So what do lizards have to do with why we’re here?” demanded Urson.

  “Why are you here?” repeated the god, subtly changing Urson’s question. “There are many reasons, I am sure. You tell me some of them.”

  “You have done wrongs to Argo—at least to Argo of Leptar,” Geo explained. “We have come to undo them. You have kidnaped the young Argo, as well as her mother apparently. We have come to take her back. You have misused the jewels. We have come to
take the last one from you.”

  Hama smiled. “Only a poet could see the wisdom in such honesty. I thought I might have to wheedle to get that much out of you.”

  “I guess it was pretty certain that you knew that much already,” Geo said.

  “True,” answered Hama. Then his tone changed. “Do you know how the jewels work?”

  They shook their heads.

  “They are basically very simple mechanical contrivances which are difficult in execution, but simple in concept. I will explain. Human thoughts, it was discovered after the Great Fire during the first glorious years of the City of New Hope, did not produce waves similar to radio waves, but the electrical synapse pattern, it was found, can be read by radio waves, in the same way a mine detector reads the existence of metal.”

  “Radio?” Geo said.

  “That’s right,” Hama said. “Oh, I forgot, you don’t know anything about that at all. Well, I can’t go through the whole thing now. Suffice it to say that each of the jewels contains a carefully honed crystal which is constantly sending out beams which can read these thought patterns. Also the crystal acts like a magnifying glass or a mirror, and reflects and magnifies the energy from the brain into heat or light or any other kind of electromagnetic radiation—there I go again—so that you can send great bolts of heat with them, as you have seen done.

  “But the actual workings of them are not important. And their ability to send heat out is only their secondary power. Their primary importance is that they can be used to penetrate the mind. Now we come to the lizards.”

  “Wait a minute,” Geo said. “Before we get to the lizards. Do you mean go into minds like Snake does?” Suddenly he remembered that the boy was not there.

  But the god went on. “Like Snake,” he said. “But different. Snake was born with the ability to transmute the brain patterns of his thoughts to others; in that he has a power something like the jewels, but nowhere as strong. But with the jewels, you can jam a person’s thoughts.… ”

  “Just go into his mind and stop him from thinking?” asked Iimmi.

  “No,” said the god. “Conscious thought is too powerful. Otherwise, you would stop thinking every time Snake spoke to you. It works another way. How many reasons does a man have for any single action?”

  They looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  “Why, for example, does a man pull his hand from a fire?”

  “Because it hurts,” said Urson. “Why else?”

  “Yes, why else?” asked Hama.

  “I think I see what you mean,” said Iimmi. “He also pulls it out because he knows that outside the fire his hand isn’t going to hurt. Like the bird, I mean the lizard. One reason we reacted like we did was because it sounded like a bird. The other reason was because we wanted to hear a bird just then. The man pulls his hand out because the fire hurts, and because he wants it not to hurt.”

  “In other words,” Geo summarized, “there are at least two reasons for everything.”

  “Exactly,” explained Hama. “And notice that one of these reasons is unconscious. But with the jewel, you can jam the unconscious reason; so that if a man has his hand in a fire, you can jam his unconscious reason of wanting it to stop hurting. Completely bewildered, and in no less pain, he will stand there until his wrist is a smoking nub.”

  Geo reached over and felt his severed arm.

  “Dictators during the entire history of this planet have used similar techniques. By not letting the people of their country know what conditions existed outside their boundaries, they could get the people to fight to stay in those conditions. It was the old adage, convince a slave that he’s free, and he will fight to maintain his slavery. Why does a poet sing? Because he likes music; and because silence frightens him. Why does a thief steal? To get the goods from his victim; also to prove that his victim cannot get him.”

  “That’s how Argo got Snake back,” Geo said to Urson. “I see now. He was just thinking of running away, and she jammed his desire not to get caught; so he had nothing to direct him in which direction to run. So he ran where she told him, straight back to her.”

  “That’s right,” Hama said. “But something else was learned when these jewels were invented. Or rather a lesson which history should have taught us thousands of years ago was finally driven home. No man can wield absolute power over other men and still retain his own mind. For no matter how good his intentions are when he takes up the power, his alternate reason is that freedom, the freedom of the people and ultimately his own, terrifies him. Only a man afraid of freedom would want this power, would conceive of wielding it. And that fear of freedom will turn him into a slave of this power. For this reason, the jewels are evil. That is why we have summoned you to steal them from us.”

  “To steal them from you?” asked Geo. “Why couldn’t you have simply destroyed them when you had them.”

  “We have already been infected,” smiled the god. “We are a small band here on Aptor. To reach the state of organization, to collect the scattered scientific knowledge of the times before the Great Fire, was not easy. Too often the jewels have been used, and abused, and now we cannot destroy it. We would have to destroy ourselves first. We kidnaped Argo and left you the second jewel, hoping that you would come after the third and last one. Now you have come, and now the jewel is being stolen.”

  “Snake?” asked Geo.

  “That’s right,” replied Hama.

  “But I thought he was your spy,” Geo said.

  “That he is our spy is his unconscious reason for his actions,” explained Hama. “He is aware only that he is working against the evil he has seen in Jordde. Spy is too harsh a word for him. Say, rather, little thief. He became a spy for us quite unwittingly when he was on the island as a child with Jordde. I have explained something to you of how the mind works. We have machines that can duplicate what Snake does in a similar way that the jewels work. This is how the blind priestesses contacted Jordde and made him their spy. This is how we reached Snake. But he never saw us, never even really talked to us. It was mainly because of something he saw, something he saw when he first got here.”

  “Wait a minute,” Iimmi said. “Jordde wanted to kill me, and did kill Whitey because of something we might have seen. I bet this was the same thing. Now, what was it?”

  Hama smiled. “My telling you would do no good. Perhaps you can find out from Snake, or my daughter, Argo Incarnate.”

  “But what do we do now?” Geo interrupted. “Take the jewels back to Argo, I mean Argo on the ship? She’s already used the jewels to control minds, at least Snake’s, so that means she’s infected, too.”

  “Once you guessed the reason for her infection,” said Hama. “We have been watching you on our screens since you landed. Do you remember what the reason was?”

  “Do you mean her being jealous of her sister?” Geo asked.

  “Yes. On one side her motives were truly patriotic for Leptar. On the other hand they were selfish ones of power seeking. But without the selfish ones, she would have never gotten so far as she did. You must bring young Argo back and give the infection a chance to work itself out.”

  “But what about the jewels?” asked Geo. “All three of them will be together. Isn’t that a huge temptation?”

  “Someone must meet this temptation, and overcome it,” said Hama. “You do not know how much danger they are in while they are here on Aptor. Even if the final danger is only delayed, that delay will make it safer to bring them to Leptar.”

  Suddenly Hama turned to the screens and pushed a switch to on position. The opaque glass was filled with a picture of the interior of the temple. On the huge statue, a spotlight was following two microscopic figures over the statue’s shoulder. They were climbing over the statue’s elbow.

  Hama increased the size. It was two people, not bugs, climbing down the gigantic sculptured figure. They made their way along the statue’s forearm now, to the golden stalks of wheat in the god’s black fist. One, and then the ot
her began to shimmy down the stems. They arrived at the base and climbed over the rail. The screen enlarged again.

  “It’s Snake,” said Geo.

  “And he’s got the jewel,” Urson added.

  “That’s Argo with him,” Iimmi put in. “I mean—one of the Argos.” They clustered around the screen, watching the congregation give way before the two fearful children. The red-haired girl in the short white tunic was holding onto Snake’s shoulder.

  Suddenly Hama turned the picture off, and they looked away from the screen now, puzzled. “So you see,” said the god, “the jewel has already been stolen. For the sake of Argo, and of Hama, carry the jewels back to Leptar. Young Argo will help you. Though her mother and I are pained to see her go, she is as prepared for the journey as you are, if not more. Will you do it?”

  “I will,” Iimmi said.

  “Me too,” said Geo.

  “I guess so,” Urson said.

  “Good,” smiled Hama. “Then come with me.” He turned from the screen and walked through the door. They followed him down the long stairway, past the stone walls, into the hall, and along the back of the church. He walked slowly, and smiled like a man who had waited long for something finally arrived. They turned out of the temple and descended the bright steps.

  “I wonder where the kids are?” Urson asked.

  But Hama led them on, across the broad garden to where the great black urns sat in a row close to a wall of shrubbery. A woman—old Argo—suddenly joined them. She had apparently been waiting for them. She gave them a silent smile of recognition, and they continued across the garden path.

  * * * *

  Light fell through the shrubbery across her white tunic and Snake’s bare back as they crouched over the contraption of coils and metal. She twisted two pieces of wire together in a final connection as Snake placed the jewel on an improvised thermocouple. Then they bent over it and both concentrated their thoughts on the bead. The thermocouple glowed red, and electricity jumped in the copper veins, turning the metal bone into a magnet. The armature tugged once around its pivot, and then tugged around once more. Finally it was whipping around steadily, the brushes on its shaft reversing the magnetic poles with each half circle of the arc. It gained speed until it whirred into an invisible copper haze between them. “Hey,” she breathed, “look at it go, will you! Just look at it go.” And the young thieves crouched over the humming motor, oblivious to the eyes of the elder gods that smiled at them from the edge of the green shift of shadow and sunlight, by the side of the marble urn.