The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  Himself.

  He saw the picture. It was quite clear. All that buildup, all the sounds and the rain and the wind, had been designed to test man in a beautiful laboratory situation. If man proved amenable to “typing,” then he was next on the food list.

  Pigs.

  If he didn’t crack, if he fought back even here and now, then the aliens would have to play their game elsewhere. Death wasn’t fun, not even to an alien.

  Death was basic.

  Yes, it was quite clear what he had to do. He didn’t know that he could do it, but he could try. He was weak on his legs and there was a cold shriek of memory that would not stay buried in his mind. He bit his lip until he felt the salt taste of blood in his mouth. He was totally unprotected now, and he knew the price he would have to pay.

  He smiled again and walked slowly toward the man called John, step by steady step.

  Gordon Collier lived an eternity while he crossed the room. He felt as though he were trapped in a nightmare that kept repeating itself over and over and over again.

  The six dead eyes at the bridge table followed him.

  “Stop,” said John.

  Gordon Collier kept coming.

  The man called John slid out of his chair and backed away. His blue eyes were cold with fear and fury.

  “Stop,” he said, his voice too high.

  Gordon Collier kept coming.

  That was when John—changed.

  Gordon Collier screamed—and kept on walking. He shaped his screaming lips into a smile and kept on walking. He felt the sickness surge within him and he kept on walking.

  Closer and closer and closer.

  He screamed and while he screamed his mind clamped on one thought and did not let go: If that seething liquid hell is hideous to me, then I am equally hideous to it.

  He kept walking. He kept his eyes open. His foot stepped into the convulsive muck on the floor. He stopped. He screamed louder. He reached out his hand to touch it. It bubbled icily….

  He knew that he would touch it if it killed him.

  The thing—cracked. It contracted with lightning speed into half its former area. It got away. It boiled furiously. It shot into a corner and stained the wall. It tried to climb. It heaved and palpitated. It stopped, advanced, wavered, advanced—

  And retreated.

  It flowed convulsively, wriggling, under the door.

  Gordon Collier screamed again and again. He looked at the three dead-alive statues at the bridge table and sobbed. He was wrenched apart.

  But he had won.

  He collapsed on the floor, sobbing. His face fell into the mound of dry gray ashes by the armchair.

  He had won. The thought was far, far away….

  One of the statues that had been his wife stirred and somehow struggled to her feet. She padded into the bedroom and got a blanket. She placed it gently over his sobbing body.

  “Poor dear,” said Helen. “He’s had a hard day.”

  Outside, there was a whistle and a roar, and then the pale light of dawn flowed in and filled the sky.

  —

  The five months passed, and little seemed changed.

  There was only one little white cottage now, and it was on Earth. It snuggled into the Illinois countryside. It had green shutters and crisp curtains on the windows. It had knickknacks on the mantelpiece over the fireplace. It had a fragment of cozy poetry, caught in a dime-store frame….

  Gordon Collier was alone now, and the loneliness was a tangible thing. His mind was almost gone, and he knew that it was gone. He knew that they had put him here to shelter him, to protect him, until he should be strong enough to take the therapy as Helen and Bart and Mary had taken it.

  But he knew that he would never be strong enough, never again.

  They pitied him. Perhaps, they even felt contempt for him. Hadn’t he failed them, despite all their work, all their expert conditioning? Hadn’t he gone to pieces with the others and reduced himself to uselessness?

  They had read the last notation in the equipment room. Odd that a meteor could unnerve a man so!

  He walked across the green grass to the white picket fence. He stood there, soaking up the sun. He heard voices—children’s voices. There they were, three of them, hurrying across the meadow. He wanted to call to them, but they were far away and he knew that his voice would not carry.

  He stood by the white fence for a very long time.

  When darkness came, and the first stars appeared above him, Gordon Collier turned and walked slowly up the path, back to the warmth, and to the little white cottage that waited to take him in.

  The Star

  ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) was a knighted British science fiction writer who lived in Sri Lanka for much of his life. He also wrote nonfiction, worked as an inventor, and served as the host of the Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World TV series. Clarke won many Hugo and Nebula Awards and still has a large readership today. He cowrote the screenplay for the iconic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and both the Arthur C. Clarke Award, for the best science fiction novel published in the United Kingdom, and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, bear his name.

  From a very early age, Clarke was a member of the British Interplanetary Society, supporting the idea of space travel as not just fiction but emerging fact. A 1940s satellite communication system proposed by Clarke won him the Franklin Institute’s Stuart Ballantine Medal (1963). He was the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society from 1946 to ’47 and again from 1951 to ’53, right before he moved to Sri Lanka.

  Clarke’s work is largely optimistic, especially in its view of science as enabling space exploration. Often, his futures are utopian settings in which advanced technology works to enhance both the natural world and human society. Scientific breakthroughs form the core, or engine, of much of his early published fiction. However, it is to Clarke’s credit that he could work in a less utopian mode as well. Today, Clarke’s less optimistic work seems most relevant to readers and retains its symbolic power, especially in the context of growing scarcity and threats due to global warming. Throughout his career, though, whether upbeat or downbeat, Clarke had the rare ability to infuse hard science fiction concepts with emotion, bringing them down to the human level.

  One of his best, and most pessimistic, short stories, “The Star,” was first published in Infinity Science Fiction in 1955 and awarded the Hugo in 1956. Later it was adapted for television as a holiday-season episode of The Twilight Zone. Although it shares the same title as the H. G. Wells story in this anthology, there is no other relationship between the two stories.

  “The Star” tells of a spaceship expedition that encounters the remains of an alien civilization and blends the religious with the scientific in a way that many readers have interpreted as a reconciliation of the numinous and the empirical. Clarke’s story is powerful not just because of the juxtaposition of life and death, but also because it mercilessly interrogates human ideas of meaning about the universe—it is very much about the human need to create narrative out of what we observe around us so that we can make sense of the unknown.

  It is also telling that the priest narrator points out that his “order has long been famous for its scientific works” even as the scientists on board the spaceship dismiss him despite his science bona fides. “It amused them to have a Jesuit as chief astrophysicist[; they] could never get over it.” Whether intended by Clarke or not, there’s an indictment in that dismissal, that lack of an attempt to understand another’s point of view. That dismissal is especially ironic given that the need to create narrative and purpose is prevalent even in seemingly objective scientific endeavors and experiments.

  THE STAR

  Arthur C. Clarke

  It is three thousand light years to the Vatican. Once, I believed that space could have no power over faith, just as I believed that the heavens declared the glory of God’s handiwork. Now
I have seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely troubled. I stare at the crucifix that hangs on the cabin wall above the Mark VI Computer, and for the first time in my life I wonder if it is no more than an empty symbol.

  I have told no one yet, but the truth cannot be concealed. The facts are there for all to read, recorded on the countless miles of magnetic tape and the thousands of photographs we are carrying back to Earth. Other scientists can interpret them as easily as I can, and I am not one who would condone that tampering with the truth which often gave my order a bad name in the olden days.

  The crew are already sufficiently depressed: I wonder how they will take this ultimate irony. Few of them have any religious faith, yet they will not relish using this final weapon in their campaign against me—that private, good-natured, but fundamentally serious, war which lasted all the way from Earth. It amused them to have a Jesuit as chief astrophysicist: Dr. Chandler, for instance, could never get over it. (Why are medical men such notorious atheists?) Sometimes he would meet me on the observation deck, where the lights are always low so that the stars shine with undiminished glory. He would come up to me in the gloom and stand staring out of the great oval port, while the heavens crawled slowly around us as the ship turned end over end with the residual spin we had never bothered to correct.

  “Well, Father,” he would say at last, “it goes on forever and forever, and perhaps Something made it. But how you can believe that Something has a special interest in us and our miserable little world—that just beats me.” Then the argument would start, while the stars and nebulae would swing around us in silent, endless arcs beyond the flawlessly clear plastic of the observation port.

  It was, I think, the apparent incongruity of my position that caused most amusement to the crew. In vain I would point to my three papers in the Astrophysical Journal, my five in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. I would remind them that my order has long been famous for its scientific works. We may be few now, but ever since the eighteenth century we have made contributions to astronomy and geophysics out of all proportion to our numbers. Will my report on the Phoenix Nebula end our thousand years of history? It will end, I fear, much more than that.

  I do not know who gave the nebula its name, which seems to me a very bad one. If it contains a prophecy, it is one that cannot be verified for several billion years. Even the word nebula is misleading: this is a far smaller object than those stupendous clouds of mist—the stuff of unborn stars—that are scattered throughout the length of the Milky Way. On the cosmic scale, indeed, the Phoenix Nebula is a tiny thing—a tenuous shell of gas surrounding a single star.

  Or what is left of a star…

  The Rubens engraving of Loyola seems to mock me as it hangs there above the spectrophotometer tracings. What would you, Father, have made of this knowledge that has come into my keeping, so far from the little world that was all the universe you knew? Would your faith have risen to the challenge, as mine has failed to do?

  You gaze into the distance, Father, but I have traveled a distance beyond any that you could have imagined when you founded our order a thousand years ago. No other survey ship has been so far from Earth: we are at the very frontiers of the explored universe. We set out to reach the Phoenix Nebula, we succeeded, and we are homeward bound with our burden of knowledge. I wish I could lift that burden from my shoulders, but I call to you in vain across the centuries and the light-years that lie between us.

  On the book you are holding the words are plain to read. AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM, the message runs, but it is a message I can no longer believe. Would you still believe it, if you could see what we have found?

  We knew, of course, what the Phoenix Nebula was. Every year, in our galaxy alone, more than a hundred stars explode, blazing for a few hours or days with thousands of times their normal brilliance before they sink back into death and obscurity. Such are the ordinary novae—the commonplace disasters of the universe. I have recorded the spectrograms and light curves of dozens since I started working at the Lunar Observatory.

  But three or four times in every thousand years occurs something beside which even a nova pales into total insignificance.

  When a star becomes a supernova, it may for a little while outshine all the massed suns of the galaxy. The Chinese astronomers watched this happen in AD 1054, not knowing what it was they saw. Five centuries later, in 1572, a supernova blazed in Cassiopeia so brilliantly that it was visible in the daylight sky. There have been three more in the thousand years that have passed since then.

  Our mission was to visit the remnants of such a catastrophe, to reconstruct the events that led up to it, and, if possible, to learn its cause. We came slowly in through the concentric shells of gas that had been blasted out six thousand years before, yet were expanding still. They were immensely hot, radiating even now with a fierce violet light, but were far too tenuous to do us any damage. When the star had exploded, its outer layers had been driven upward with such speed that they had escaped completely from its gravitational field. Now they formed a hollow shell large enough to engulf a thousand solar systems, and at its center burned the tiny, fantastic object which the star had now become—a white dwarf, smaller than the Earth, yet weighing a million times as much.

  The glowing gas shells were all around us, banishing the normal night of interstellar space. We were flying into the center of a cosmic bomb that had detonated millennia ago and whose incandescent fragments were still hurtling apart. The immense scale of the explosion, and the fact that the debris already covered a volume of space many billions of miles across, robbed the scene of any visible movement. It would take decades before the unaided eye could detect any motion in these tortured wisps and eddies of gas, yet the sense of turbulent expansion was overwhelming.

  We had checked our primary drive hours before, and were drifting slowly toward the fierce little star ahead. Once it had been a sun like our own, but it had squandered in a few hours the energy that should have kept it shining for a million years. Now it was a shrunken miser, hoarding its resources as if trying to make amends for its prodigal youth.

  No one seriously expected to find planets. If there had been any before the explosion, they would have been boiled into puffs of vapor, and their substance lost in the greater wreckage of the star itself. But we made the automatic search, as we always do when approaching an unknown sun, and presently we found a single small world circling the star at an immense distance. It must have been the Pluto of this vanished solar system, orbiting on the frontiers of the night. Too far from the central sun ever to have known life, its remoteness had saved it from the fate of all its lost companions.

  The passing fires had seared its rocks and burned away the mantle of frozen gas that must have covered it in the days before the disaster. We landed, and we found the Vault.

  Its builders had made sure that we would. The monolithic marker that stood above the entrance was now a fused stump, but even the first long-range photographs told us that here was the work of intelligence. A little later we detected the continent-wide pattern of radioactivity that had been buried in the rock. Even if the pylon above the Vault had been destroyed, this would have remained, an immovable and all but eternal beacon calling to the stars. Our ship fell toward this gigantic bull’s-eye like an arrow into its target.

  The pylon must have been a mile high when it was built, but now it looked like a candle that had melted down into a puddle of wax. It took us a week to drill through the fused rock, since we did not have the proper tools for a task like this. We were astronomers, not archaeologists, but we could improvise. Our original purpose was forgotten: this lonely monument, reared with such labor at the greatest possible distance from the doomed sun, could have only one meaning. A civilization that knew it was about to die had made its last bid for immortality.

  It will take us generations to examine all the treasures that were placed in the Vault. They had plenty of time to prepare, for their sun must have given its first w
arnings many years before the final detonation. Everything that they wished to preserve, all the fruit of their genius, they brought here to this distant world in the days before the end, hoping that some other race would find it and that they would not be utterly forgotten. Would we have done so as well, or would we have been too lost in our own misery to give thought to a future we could never see or share?

  If only they had had a little more time! They could travel freely enough between the planets of their own sun, but they had not yet learned to cross the interstellar gulfs, and the nearest solar system was a hundred light-years away. Yet even had they possessed the secret of the Transfinite Drive, no more than a few millions could have been saved. Perhaps it was better thus.

  Even if they had not been so disturbingly human as their sculpture shows, we could not have helped admiring them and grieving for their fate. They left thousands of visual records and the machines for projecting them, together with elaborate pictorial instructions from which it will not be difficult to learn their written language. We have examined many of these records, and brought to life for the first time in six thousand years the warmth and beauty of a civilization that in many ways must have been superior to our own. Perhaps they only showed us the best, and one can hardly blame them. But their words were very lovely, and their cities were built with a grace that matches anything of man’s. We have watched them at work and play, and listened to their musical speech sounding across the centuries. One scene is still before my eyes—a group of children on a beach of strange blue sand, playing in the waves as children play on Earth. Curious whiplike trees line the shore, and some very large animal is wading in the shadows yet attracting no attention at all.

  And sinking into the sea, still warm and friendly and life-giving, is the sun that will soon turn traitor and obliterate all this innocent happiness.

  Perhaps if we had not been so far from home and so vulnerable to loneliness, we should not have been so deeply moved. Many of us had seen the ruins of ancient civilizations on other worlds, but they had never affected us so profoundly. This tragedy was unique. It is one thing for a race to fail and die, as nations and cultures have done on Earth. But to be destroyed so completely in the full flower of its achievement, leaving no survivors—how could that be reconciled with the mercy of God?