The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (24 page)

She touched the bracelet around her own wrist and gave a wan smile. ‘We have many other powers beside this.’

‘Then why did you need my help?’

‘There were technical reasons. It was necessary to remove the objects we required from the presence of other matter. In this way, we could gather only what we needed and not waste our limited—what shall I call them?—transporting facilities. Now may I have the bracelet back?’

Ashton slowly handed over the one he was carrying, but made no effort to unfasten his own. There might be danger in what he was doing, but he intended to retreat at the first sign of it.

‘I’m prepared to reduce my fee,’ he said. ‘In fact I’ll waive all payment—in exchange for this.’ He touched his wrist, where the intricate metal band gleamed in the sunlight.

She was watching him with an expression as fathomless as the Gioconda smile. (Had
that
, Ashton wondered, gone to join the treasure he had gathered? How much had they taken from the Louvre?)

‘I would not call that reducing your fee. All the money in the world could not purchase one of those bracelets.’

‘Or the things I have given you.’

‘You are greedy, Mr Ashton. You know that with an accelerator the entire world would be yours.’

‘What of that? Do you have any further interest in our planet, now you have taken what you need?’

There was a pause. Then, unexpectedly, she smiled. ‘So you have guessed I do not belong to your world.’

‘Yes. And I know that you have other agents besides myself. Do you come from Mars, or won’t you tell me?’

‘I am quite willing to tell you. But you may not thank me if I do.’

Ashton looked at her warily. What did she mean by that? Unconscious of his action, he put his wrist behind his back, protecting the bracelet.

‘No, I am not from Mars, or any planet of which you have ever heard. You would not understand
what
I am. Yet I will tell you this. I am from the Future.’

‘The Future! That’s ridiculous!’

‘Indeed? I should be interested to know why.’

‘If that sort of thing were possible, our past history would be full of time travellers. Besides, it would involve a
reductio ad absurdum
. Going into the past could change the present and produce all sorts of paradoxes.’

‘Those are good points, though not perhaps as original as you suppose. But they only refute the possibility of time travel in general, not in the very special case which concerns us now.’

‘What is peculiar about it?’ he asked.

‘On very rare occasions, and by the release of an enormous amount of energy, it is possible to produce a—
singularity
—in time. During the fraction of a second when that singularity occurs, the past becomes accessible to the future, though only in a restricted way. We can send our minds back to you, but not our bodies.’

‘You mean,’ said Ashton, ‘that you are
borrowing
the body I see?’

‘Oh, I have paid for it, as I am paying you. The owner has agreed to the terms. We are very conscientious in these matters.’

Ashton was thinking swiftly. If this story was true, it gave him a definite advantage.

‘You mean,’ he continued, ‘that you have no direct control over matter, and must work through human agents?’

‘Yes. Even those bracelets were made here, under our mental control.’

She was explaining too much too readily, revealing all her weaknesses. A warning signal was flashing in the back of Ashton’s mind, but he had committed himself too deeply to retreat.

‘Then it seems to me,’ he said slowly, ‘that you cannot force me to hand this bracelet back.’

‘That is perfectly true.’

‘That’s all I want to know.’

She was smiling at him now, and there was something in that smile that chilled him to the marrow.

‘We are not vindictive or unkind, Mr Ashton,’ she said quietly. ‘What I am going to do now appeals to my sense of justice. You have asked for that bracelet; you can keep it. Now I shall tell you just how useful it will be.’

For a moment Ashton had a wild impulse to hand back the accelerator. She must have guessed his thoughts.

‘No, it’s too late. I insist that you keep it. And I can reassure you on one point. It won’t wear out. It will last you’—again that enigmatic smile—‘the rest of your life.

‘Do you mind if we go for a walk, Mr Ashton? I have done my work here, and would like to have a last glimpse of your world before I leave it forever.’

She turned toward the iron gates, and did not wait for a reply. Consumed by curiosity, Ashton followed.

They walked in silence until they were standing among the frozen traffic of Tottenham Court Road. For a while she stood staring at the busy yet motionless crowds; then she sighed.

‘I cannot help feeling sorry for them, and for you. I wonder what you would have made of yourselves.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Just now, Mr Ashton, you implied that the future cannot reach back into the past, because that would alter history. A shrewd remark, but, I am afraid, irrelevant. You see,
your
world has no more history to alter.’

She pointed across the road, and Ashton turned swiftly on his heels. There was nothing there except a newsboy crouching over his pile of papers. A placard formed an impossible curve in the breeze that was blowing through this motionless world. Ashton read the crudely lettered words with difficulty:

SUPER-BOMB TEST TODAY

The voice in his ears seemed to come from a very long way off.

‘I told you that time travel, even in this restricted form, requires an enormous release of energy—far more than a single bomb can liberate, Mr Ashton. But that bomb is only a trigger—’

She pointed to the solid ground beneath their feet. ‘Do you know anything about your own planet? Probably not; your race has learned so little. But even your scientists have discovered that, two thousand miles down, the Earth has a dense, liquid core. That core is made of compressed matter, and it can exist in either of two stable states. Given a certain stimulus, it can change from one of those states to another, just as a seesaw can tip over at the touch of a finger. But that change, Mr Ashton, will liberate as much energy as all the earthquakes since the beginning of your world. The oceans and continents will fly into space; the sun will have a second asteroid belt.

‘That cataclysm will send its echoes down the ages, and will open up to us a fraction of a second in your time. During that instant, we are trying to save what we can of your world’s treasures. It is all that we can do; even if your motives were purely selfish and completely dishonest, you have done your race a service you never intended.

‘And now I must return to our ship, where it waits by the ruins of Earth almost a hundred thousand years from now. You can keep the bracelet.’

The withdrawal was instantaneous. The woman suddenly froze and became one with the other statues in the silent street. He was alone.

Alone! Ashton held the gleaming bracelet before his eyes, hypnotised by its intricate workmanship and by the powers it concealed. He had made a bargain, and he must keep it. He could live out the full span of his life—at the cost of an isolation no other man had ever known. If he switched off the field, the last seconds of history would tick inexorably away.

Seconds?
Indeed, there was less time than that. For he knew that the bomb must already have exploded.

He sat down on the edge of the pavement and began to think. There was no need to panic; he must take things calmly, without hysteria. After all, he had plenty of time.

All the time in the world.

The Nine Billion Names of God

First published in
Star Science Fiction Stories
1, ed. Frederik Pohl, 1953

Collected in
The Other Side of the Sky

This story triggered a charming response from the highest possible authority—His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

‘This is a slightly unusual request,’ said Dr Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. ‘As far as I know, it’s the first time anyone’s been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an Automatic Sequence Computer. I don’t wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly have thought that your—ah—establishment had much use for such a machine. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?’

‘Gladly,’ replied the lama, readjusting his silk robes and carefully putting away the slide rule he had been using for currency conversions. ‘Your Mark V Computer can carry out any routine mathematical operation involving up to ten digits. However, for our work we are interested in
letters
, not numbers. As we wish you to modify the output circuits, the machine will be printing words, not columns of figures.’

‘I don’t quite understand…’

‘This is a project on which we have been working for the last three centuries—since the lamasery was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your way of thought, so I hope you will listen with an open mind while I explain it.’

‘Naturally.’

‘It is really quite simple. We have been compiling a list which shall contain all the possible names of God.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘We have reason to believe,’ continued the lama imperturbably, ‘that all such names can be written with not more than nine letters in an alphabet we have devised.’

‘And you have been doing this for three centuries?’

‘Yes: we expected it would take us about fifteen thousand years to complete the task.’

‘Oh,’ Dr Wagner looked a little dazed. ‘Now I see why you wanted to hire one of our machines. But exactly what is the
purpose
of this project?’

The lama hesitated for a fraction of a second, and Wagner wondered if he had offended him. If so, there was no trace of annoyance in the reply.

‘Call it ritual, if you like, but it’s a fundamental part of our belief. All the many names of the Supreme Being—God, Jehovah, Allah, and so on—they are only man-made labels. There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty here, which I do not propose to discuss, but somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters that can occur are what one may call the
real
names of God. By systematic permutation of letters, we have been trying to list them all.’

‘I see. You’ve been starting at AAAAAAA… and working up to ZZZZZZZZ….’

‘Exactly—though we use a special alphabet of our own. Modifying the electromatic typewriters to deal with this is, of course, trivial. A rather more interesting problem is that of devising suitable circuits to eliminate ridiculous combinations. For example, no letter must occur more than three times in succession.’

‘Three? Surely you mean two.’

‘Three is correct: I am afraid it would take too long to explain why, even if you understood our language.’

‘I’m sure it would,’ said Wagner hastily. ‘Go on.’

‘Luckily, it will be a simple matter to adapt your Automatic Sequence Computer for this work, since once it has been programmed properly it will permute each letter in turn and print the result. What would have taken us fifteen thousand years it will be able to do in a hundred days.’

Dr Wagner was scarcely conscious of the faint sounds from the Manhattan streets far below. He was in a different world, a world of natural, not man-made, mountains. High up in their remote aeries these monks had been patiently at work, generation after generation, compiling their lists of meaningless words. Was there any limit to the follies of mankind? Still, he must give no hint of his inner thoughts. The customer was always right….

‘There’s no doubt,’ replied the doctor, ‘that we can modify the Mark V to print lists of this nature. I’m much more worried about the problem of installation and maintenance. Getting out to Tibet, in these days, is not going to be easy.’

‘We can arrange that. The components are small enough to travel by air—that is one reason why we chose your machine. If you can get them to India, we will provide transport from there.’

‘And you want to hire two of our engineers?’

‘Yes, for the three months that the project should occupy.’

‘I’ve no doubt that Personnel can manage that.’ Dr Wagner scribbled a note on his desk pad. ‘There are just two other points—’