The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (33 page)

‘You must have known all the time! Why didn’t you tell me?’

Hopkins gave her a wounded expression.

‘You didn’t ask me,’ he said.

We hauled Mays down about an hour later. He was only twenty kilometres up, and we located him quickly enough by the flashing light on his suit. His radio had been disconnected, for a reason that hadn’t occurred to me. He was intelligent enough to realise that he was in no danger, and if his set had been working he could have called his ship and exposed our bluff. That is, if he wanted to. Personally, I think I’d have been glad enough to call the whole thing off even if I had known that I was perfectly safe. It must have been awfully lonely up there.

To my great surprise, Mays wasn’t as mad as I’d expected. Perhaps he was too relieved to be back in our snug little cabin when we drifted up to him on the merest fizzle of rockets and yanked him in. Or perhaps he felt that he’d been worsted in fair fight and didn’t bear any grudge. I really think it was the latter.

There isn’t much more to tell, except that we did play one other trick on him before we left Five. He had a good deal more fuel in his tanks than he really needed, now that his payload was substantially reduced. By keeping the excess ourselves, we were able to carry The Ambassador back to Ganymede after all. Oh, yes, the Professor gave him a cheque for the fuel we’d borrowed. Everything was perfectly legal.

There’s one amusing sequel I must tell you, though. The day after the new gallery was opened at the British Museum I went along to see The Ambassador, partly to discover if his impact was still as great in these changed surroundings. (For the record, it wasn’t—though it’s still considerable and Bloomsbury will never be quite the same to me again.) A huge crowd was milling around the gallery, and there in the middle of it was Mays and Marianne.

It ended up with us having a very pleasant lunch together in Holborn. I’ll say this about Mays—he doesn’t bear any grudges. But I’m still rather sore about Marianne.

And, frankly, I can’t imagine
what
she sees in him.

Encounter in the Dawn

First published in
Amazing
, June/July 1953

Collected
in Expedition to Earth

This inspired the opening sequence of
2001:A Space Odyssey
. Dan Richter, who played Moon Watcher, has made the transition from Man-ape to LA Executive in a single lifetime. I am sure he must still find that bone club quite useful around Hollywood.

It was in the last days of the Empire. The tiny ship was far from home, and almost a hundred light-years from the great parent vessel searching through the loosely packed stars at the rim of the Milky Way. But even here it could not escape from the shadow that lay across civilisation: beneath that shadow, pausing ever and again in their work to wonder how their distant homes were faring, the scientists of the Galactic Survey still laboured at their never-ending task.

The ship held only three occupants, but between them they carried knowledge of many sciences, and the experience of half a lifetime in space. After the long interstellar night, the star ahead was warming their spirits as they dropped down towards its fires. A little more golden, a trifle more brilliant than the Sun that now seemed a legend of their childhood. They knew from past experience that the chance of locating planets here was more than ninety per cent, and for the moment they forgot all else in the excitement of discovery.

They found the first planet within minutes of coming to rest. It was a giant, of a familiar type, too cold for protoplasmic life and probably possessing no stable surface. So they turned their search sunward, and presently were rewarded.

It was a world that made their hearts ache for home, a world where everything was hauntingly familiar, yet never quite the same. Two great land masses floated in blue-green seas, capped by ice at either pole. There were some desert regions, but the larger part of the planet was obviously fertile. Even from this distance, the signs of vegetation were unmistakably clear.

They gazed hungrily at the expanding landscape as they fell down into the atmosphere, heading towards noon in the sub-tropics. The ship plummeted through cloudless skies towards a great river, checked its fall with a surge of soundless power, and came to rest among the long grasses by the water’s edge.

No one moved: there was nothing to be done until the automatic instruments had finished their work. Then a bell tinkled softly and the lights on the control board flashed in a pattern of meaningful chaos. Captain Altman rose to his feet with a sigh of relief.

‘We’re in luck,’ he said. ‘We can go outside without protection, if the pathogenic tests are satisfactory. What did you make of the place as we came in, Bertrond?’

‘Geologically stable—no active volcanoes, at least. I didn’t see any trace of cities, but that proves nothing. If there’s a civilisation here, it may have passed that stage.’

‘Or not reached it yet?’

Bertrond shrugged. ‘Either’s just as likely. It may take us some time to find out on a planet this size.’

‘More time than we’ve got,’ said Clindar, glancing at the communications panel that linked them to the mother ship and thence to the Galaxy’s threatened heart. For a moment there was a gloomy silence. Then Clindar walked to the control board and pressed a pattern of keys with automatic skill.

With a slight jar, a section of the hull slid aside and the fourth member of the crew stepped out on to the new planet, flexing metal limbs and adjusting servo motors to the unaccustomed gravity. Inside the ship, a television screen glimmered into life, revealing a long vista of waving grasses, some trees in the middle distance, and a glimpse of the great river. Clindar punched a button, and the picture flowed steadily across the screen as the robot turned its head.

‘Which way shall we go?’ Clindar asked.

‘Let’s have a look at those trees,’ Altman replied. ‘If there’s any animal life we’ll find it there.’

‘Look!’ cried Bertrond. ‘A bird!’

Clindar’s fingers flew over the keyboard; the picture centred on the tiny speck that had suddenly appeared on the left of the screen, and expanded rapidly as the robot’s telephoto lens came into action.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Feathers—beak—well up the evolutionary ladder. This place looks promising. I’ll start the camera.’

The swaying motion of the picture as the robot walked forward did not distract them: they had grown accustomed to it long ago. But they had never become reconciled to this exploration by proxy when all their impulses cried out to them to leave the ship, to run through the grass and to feel the wind blowing against their faces. Yet it was too great a risk to take, even on a world that seemed as fair as this. There was always a skull hidden behind Nature’s most smiling face. Wild beasts, poisonous reptiles, quagmires—death could come to the unwary explorer in a thousand disguises. And worst of all were the invisible enemies, the bacteria and viruses against which the only defence might often be a thousand light-years away.

A robot could laugh at all these dangers and even if, as sometimes happened, it encountered a beast powerful enough to destroy it—well, machines could always be replaced.

They met nothing on the walk across the grasslands. If any small animals were disturbed by the robot’s passage, they kept outside its field of vision. Clindar slowed the machine as it approached the trees, and the watchers in the spaceship flinched involuntarily at the branches that appeared to slash across their eyes. The picture dimmed for a moment before the controls readjusted themselves to the weaker illumination; then it came back to normal.

The forest was full of life. It lurked in the undergrowth, clambered among the branches, flew through the air. It fled chattering and gibbering through the trees as the robot advanced. And all the while the automatic cameras were recording the pictures that formed on the screen, gathering material for the biologists to analyse when the ship returned to base.

Clindar breathed a sigh of relief when the trees suddenly thinned. It was exhausting work, keeping the robot from smashing into obstacles as it moved through the forest, but on open ground it could take care of itself. Then the picture trembled as if beneath a hammer-blow, there was a grinding metallic thud, and the whole scene swept vertiginously upward as the robot toppled and fell.

‘What’s that?’ cried Altman. ‘Did you trip?’

‘No,’ said Clindar grimly, his finger flying over the keyboard. ‘Something attacked from the rear. I hope—ah—I’ve still got control.’

He brought the robot to a sitting position and swivelled its head. It did not take long to find the cause of the trouble. Standing a few feet away, and lashing its tail angrily, was a large quadruped with a most ferocious set of teeth. At the moment it was, fairly obviously, trying to decide whether to attack again.

Slowly, the robot rose to its feet, and as it did so the great beast crouched to spring. A smile flitted across Clindar’s face: he knew how to deal with this situation. His thumb felt for the seldom-used key labelled ‘Siren’.

The forest echoed with a hideous undulating scream from the robot’s concealed speaker, and the machine advanced to meet its adversary, arms flailing in front of it. The startled beast almost fell over backward in its effort to turn, and in seconds was gone from sight.

‘Now I suppose we’ll have to wait a couple of hours until everything comes out of hiding again,’ said Bertrond ruefully.

‘I don’t know much about animal psychology,’ interjected Altman, ‘but is it usual for them to attack something completely unfamiliar?’

‘Some will attack anything that moves, but that’s unusual. Normally they attack only for food, or if they’ve already been threatened. What are you driving at? Do you suggest that there are other robots on this planet?’

‘Certainly not. But our carnivorous friend may have mistaken our machine for a more edible biped. Don’t you think that this opening in the jungle is rather unnatural? It could easily be a path.’

‘In that case,’ said Clindar promptly, ‘we’ll follow it and find out. I’m tired of dodging trees, but I hope nothing jumps on us again: it’s bad for my nerves.’

‘You were right, Altman,’ said Bertrond a little later. ‘It’s certainly a path. But that doesn’t mean intelligence. After all, animals—’

He stopped in mid-sentence, and at the same instant Clindar brought the advancing robot to a halt. The path had suddenly opened out into a wide clearing, almost completely occupied by a village of flimsy huts. It was ringed by a wooden palisade, obviously defence against an enemy who at the moment presented no threat. For the gates were wide open, and beyond them the inhabitants were going peacefully about their ways.

For many minutes the three explorers stared in silence at the screen. Then Clindar shivered a little and remarked: ‘It’s uncanny. It might be our own planet, a hundred thousand years ago. I feel as if I’ve gone back in time.’

‘There’s nothing weird about it,’ said the practical Altman. ‘After all, we’ve discovered nearly a hundred planets with our type of life on them.’

‘Yes,’ retorted Clindar. ‘A hundred in the whole Galaxy! I still think that it’s strange it had to happen to us.’

‘Well, it had to happen to
somebody
,’ said Bertrond philosophically. ‘Meanwhile, we must work out our contact procedure. If we send the robot into the village it will start a panic.’

‘That,’ said Altman, ‘is a masterly understatement. What we’ll have to do is catch a native by himself and prove that we’re friendly. Hide the robot, Clindar—somewhere in the woods where it can watch the village without being spotted. We’ve a week’s practical anthropology ahead of us!’

It was three days before the biological tests showed that it would be safe to leave the ship. Even then Bertrond insisted on going alone—alone, that is, if one ignored the substantial company of the robot. With such an ally he was not afraid of this planet’s larger beasts, and his body’s natural defences could take care of the micro-organisms, so, at least, the analysers had assured him: and considering the complexity of the problem, they made remarkably few mistakes.