Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (189 page)

Perhaps the best known of the enthusiasts was the famed Nevermore Laboratory’s Dr Raven, driving force behind Project EXCELSIOR. Although details were highly classified, it was known that the technology involved the use of hydrogen bombs to evaporate vast quantities of ocean, leaving behind all mineral (including gold) content to later processing.

Needless to say, many were highly critical of the project, but Dr Raven was able to defend it from behind his smoke screen of secrecy. To those who complained, ‘Won’t the gold be radioactive?’ he answered cheerfully, ‘So what? That will make it harder to steal! And anyway, it will be buried in bank vaults, so it doesn’t matter.’

But perhaps his most telling argument was that one by-product of EXCELSIOR would be several megatons of instant boiled fish, to feed the starving multitudes of the Third World.

Another surprising advocate of the BDI was the mayor of New York. On hearing that the estimated total weight of the oceans’ gold was at least five
billion
tons, the controversial Fidel Bloch proclaimed, ‘At last our great city will have its streets paved with gold!’ His numerous critics suggested that he start with the sidewalks so that hapless New Yorkers no longer disappeared into unplumbed depths.

The most telling criticisms came from the Union of Concerned Economists, which pointed out that the BDI might have many disastrous byproducts. Unless carefully controlled, the injection of vast quantities of gold would have incalculable effects upon the world’s monetary system. Something approaching panic had already affected the international jewellery trade when sales of wedding rings had slumped to zero immediately after the President’s speech.

The most vocal protests, however, had come from Moscow. To the accusation that BDI was a subtle capitalist plot, the secretary of the Treasury had retorted that the USSR already had most of the world’s gold in its vaults, so its objections were purely hypocritical. The logic of this reply was still being unravelled when the President added to the confusion. She startled everyone by announcing that when the BDI technology was developed, the United States would gladly share it with the Soviet Union. Nobody believed her.

By this time there was hardly any professional organisation that had not become involved in BDI, either pro or con. (Or, in some cases, both.) The international lawyers pointed out a problem that the President had overlooked: Who actually owned the oceans’ gold? Presumably every country could claim the contents of the seawater out to the two-hundred-mile limit of the Economic Zone – but because ocean currents were continuously stirring this vast volume of liquid, the gold wouldn’t stay in one place.

A single extraction plant, at
any
spot in the world’s oceans, could eventually get it all – irrespective of national claims! What did the United States propose to do about that? Only faint noises of embarrassment emerged from the White House.

One person who was not embarrassed by this criticism – or any other – was the able and ubiquitous director of the BDIO. General Isaacson had made his formidable and well-deserved reputation as a Pentagon trouble-shooter: perhaps his most celebrated achievement was the breaking up of the sinister, Mafia-controlled ring that had attempted to corner one of the most lucrative advertising outlets in the United States – the countless billions of sheets of armed-services toilet tissue.

It was the general who harangued the media and arranged demonstrations of the still-emerging BDI technology. His presentation of gold – well, gold-plated – tie clips to visiting journalists and TV reporters was a widely acclaimed stroke of genius. Not until after they had published their fulsome reports did the media representatives belatedly realise that the crafty general had never said in as many words that the gold had actually come from the sea.

By then, of course, it was too late to issue any qualifications.

At the present moment – four years after the President’s speech and only a year into her second term – it is still impossible to predict the BDI’s future. General Isaacson has set to sea on a vast floating platform looking, as
Newsweek
magazine put it, as if an aircraft carrier had tried to make love to an oil refinery. Dr Keystone, claiming that his work was well and truly done, has resigned to go looking for the
greater
Patagonian trivit. And, most ominously, US reconnaissance satellites have revealed that the USSR is building perfectly enormous pipes at strategic points all along its coastline.

The Hammer of God

First published in
Time
, 28 September 1992

The genesis of this story was a surprise request from
Time
magazine saying that: ‘We have never before published fiction, intentionally.’ This of course was a challenge I couldn’t resist, and the money wasn’t bad either. A few years later I realised this would be the basis for a novel …

The danger of asteroid or comet impact on our planet is now widely accepted, and Steven Spielberg optioned the novel before he made his own
Deep Impact
.

It came in vertically, punching a hole 10 km wide through the atmosphere, generating temperatures so high that the air itself started to burn. When it hit the ground near the Gulf of Mexico, rock turned to liquid and spread outward in mountainous waves, not freezing until it had formed a crater 200 km across
.

That was only the beginning of disaster: now the real tragedy began. Nitric oxides rained from the air, turning the sea to acid. Clouds of soot from incinerated forests darkened the sky, hiding the sun for months. Worldwide, the temperature dropped precipitously, killing off most of the plants and animals that had survived the initial cataclysm. Though some species would linger on for millenniums, the reign of the great reptiles was finally over
.

The clock of evolution had been reset; the countdown to Man had begun. The date was, very approximately, 65 million BC
.

Captain Robert Singh never tired of walking in the forest with his little son Toby. It was, of course, a tamed and gentle forest, guaranteed to be free of dangerous animals, but it made an exciting contrast to the rolling sand dunes of their last environment in the Saudi desert – and the one before that, on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. But when the Skylift Service had moved the house this time, something had gone wrong with the food-recycling system. Though the electronic menus had fail-safe backups, there had been a curious metallic taste to some of the items coming out of the synthesiser recently.

‘What’s that, Daddy?’ asked the four-year-old, pointing to a small hairy face peering at them through a screen of leaves.

‘Er, some kind of monkey. We’ll ask the Brain when we get home.’

‘Can I play with it?’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea. It could bite. And it probably has fleas. Your robotoys are much nicer.’

‘But …’

Captain Singh knew what would happen next; he had run this sequence a dozen times. Toby would begin to cry, the monkey would disappear, he would comfort the child as he carried him back to the house …

But that had been 20 years ago and a quarter-billion kilometres away. The playback came to an end; sound, vision, the scent of unknown flowers and the gentle touch of the wind slowly faded. Suddenly, he was back in this cabin aboard the orbital tug
Goliath
, commanding the 100-person team of Operation ATLAS, the most critical mission in the history of space exploration. Toby, and the stepmothers and stepfathers of his extended family, remained behind on a distant world which Singh could never revisit. Decades in space – and neglect of the mandatory zero-G exercises – had so weakened him that he could now walk only on the Moon and Mars. Gravity had exiled him from the planet of his birth.

‘One hour to rendezvous, Captain,’ said the quiet but insistent voice of David, as
Goliath
’s central computer had been inevitably named. ‘Active mode, as requested. Time to come back to the real world.’

Goliath
’s human commander felt a wave of sadness sweep over him as the final image from his lost past dissolved into a featureless, simmering mist of white noise. Too swift a transition from one reality to another was a good recipe for schizophrenia, and Captain Singh always eased the shock with the most soothing sound he knew: waves falling gently on a beach, with sea gulls crying in the distance. It was yet another memory of a life he had lost, and of a peaceful past that had now been replaced by a fearful present.

For a few more moments, he delayed facing his awesome responsibility. Then he sighed and removed the neural-input cap that fitted snugly over his skull and had enabled him to call up his distant past. Like all spacers, Captain Singh belonged to the ‘Bald Is Beautiful’ school, if only because wigs were a nuisance in zero gravity. The social historians were still staggered by the fact that one invention, the portable ‘Brainman’, could make bare heads the norm within a single decade. Not even quick-change skin colouring, or the lens-corrective laser shaping which had abolished eyeglasses, had made such an impact upon style and fashion.

‘Captain,’ said David. ‘I know you’re there. Or do you want me to take over?’

It was an old joke, inspired by all the insane computers in the fiction and movies of the early electronic age. David had a surprisingly good sense of humour: he was, after all, a Legal Person (Nonhuman) under the famous Hundredth Amendment, and shared – or surpassed – almost all the attributes of his creators. But there were whole sensory and emotional areas which he could not enter. It had been felt unnecessary to equip him with smell or taste, though it would have been easy to do so. And all his attempts at telling dirty stories were such disastrous failures that he had abandoned the genre.

‘All right, David,’ replied the captain. ‘I’m still in charge.’ He removed the mask from his eyes, and turned reluctantly toward the viewport. There, hanging in space before him, was Kali.

It looked harmless enough: just another small asteroid, shaped so exactly like a peanut that the resemblance was almost comical. A few large impact craters, and hundreds of tiny ones, were scattered at random over its charcoal-grey surface. There were no visual clues to give any sense of scale, but Singh knew its dimensions by heart: 1,295 m maximum length, 456 m minimum width. Kali would fit easily into many city parks.

No wonder that, even now, most of humankind could still not believe that this modest asteroid was the instrument of doom. Or, as the Chrislamic Fundamentalists were calling it, ‘the Hammer of God’.

The sudden rise of Chrislam had been traumatic equally to Rome and Mecca. Christianity was already reeling from John Paul XXV’s eloquent but belated plea for contraception and the irrefutable proof in the New Dead Sea Scrolls that the Jesus of the Gospels was a composite of at least three persons. Meanwhile the Muslim world had lost much of its economic power when the Cold Fusion breakthrough, after the fiasco of its premature announcement, had brought the Oil Age to a sudden end. The time had been ripe for a new religion embodying, as even its severest critics admitted, the best elements of two ancient ones.

The Prophet Fatima Magdalene (née Ruby Goldenburg) had attracted almost 100 million adherents before her spectacular – and, some maintained, self-contrived – martyrdom. Thanks to the brilliant use of neural programming to give previews of Paradise during its ceremonies, Chrislam had grown explosively, though it was still far outnumbered by its parent religions.

Inevitably, after the Prophet’s death the movement split into rival factions, each upholding
the
True Faith. The most fanatical was a fundamental group calling itself ‘the Reborn’, which claimed to be in direct contact with God (or at least Her Archangels) via the listening post they had established in the silent zone on the far side of the Moon, shielded from the radio racket of Earth by 3,000 km of solid rock.

Now Kali filled the main view-screen. No magnification was needed, for
Goliath
was hovering only 200 m above its ancient, battered surface. Two crew members had already landed, with the traditional ‘One small step for a man’ – even though walking was impossible on this almost zero-gravity worldlet.

‘Deploying radio beacon. We’ve got it anchored securely. Now Kali won’t be able to hide from us.’

It was a feeble joke, not meriting the laughter it aroused from the dozen officers on the bridge. Ever since rendezvous, there had been a subtle change in the crew’s morale, with unpredictable swings between gloom and juvenile humour. The ship’s physician had already prescribed tranquillisers for one mild case of manic-depressive symptons. It would grow worse in the long weeks ahead, when there would be little to do but wait.

The first waiting period had already begun. Back on Earth, giant radio telescopes were tuned to receive the pulses from the beacon. Although Kali’s orbit had already been calculated with the greatest possible accuracy, there was still a slim chance that the asteroid might pass harmlessly by. The radio measuring rod would settle the matter, for better or worse.

It was a long two hours before the verdict came, and David relayed it to the crew.