Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (26 page)

‘Do you know what this is?’

‘It looks like a character analysis.’

‘Correct. It happens to be yours.’

‘Oh! This is rather illegal, isn’t it?’

‘Never mind that. The key is printed along the bottom; it runs from Aesthetic Appreciation to Wit. The last column gives your Intelligence Quotient. Don’t let it go to your head.’

Peyton studied the card intently. Once, he flushed slightly.

‘I don’t see how you knew.’

‘Never mind,’ grinned Henson. ‘Now look at this analysis.’ He handed over a second card.

‘Why, it’s the same one!’

‘Not quite, but very nearly.’

‘Whom does it belong to?’

Henson leaned back in his chair and measured out his words slowly.

‘That analysis, Dick, belongs to your great-grandfather twenty-two times removed on the direct male line – the great Rolf Thordarsen.’

Peyton took off like a rocket.

‘What!’

‘Don’t shout the place down. We’re discussing old times at college if anyone comes in.’

‘But – Thordarsen!’

‘Well, if we go back far enough we’ve all got equally distinguished ancestors. But now you know why your grandfather is afraid of you.’

‘He’s left it till rather late. I’ve practically finished my training.’

‘You can thank us for that. Normally our analysis goes back ten generations, twenty in special cases. It’s a tremendous job. There are hundreds of millions of cards in the Inheritance Library, one for every man and woman who has lived since the twenty-third century. This coincidence was discovered quite accidentally about a month ago.’

‘
That’s
when the trouble started. But I still don’t understand what it’s all about.’

‘Exactly what do you know, Dick, about your famous ancestor?’

‘No more than anyone else, I suppose. I certainly don’t know how or why he disappeared, if that’s what you mean. Didn’t he leave Earth?’

‘No. He left the world, if you like, but he never left Earth. Very few people know this, Dick, but Rolf Thordarsen was the man who built Comarre.’

Comarre! Peyton breathed the word through half-open lips. savouring its meaning and its strangeness. So it
did
exist, after all! Even that had been denied by some.

Henson was speaking again.

‘I don’t suppose you know very much about the Decadents. The history books have been rather carefully edited. But the whole story is linked up with the end of the Second Electronic Age….’

Twenty thousand miles above the surface of the Earth, the artificial moon that housed the World Council was spinning on its eternal orbit. The roof of the Council Chamber was one flawless sheet of crystallite; when the members of the Council were in session it seemed as if there was nothing between them and the great globe spinning far below.

The symbolism was profound. No narrow parochial viewpoint could long survive in such a setting. Here, if anywhere, the minds of men would surely produce their greatest works.

Richard Peyton the Elder had spent his life guiding the destinies of Earth. For five hundred years the human race had known peace and had lacked nothing that art or science could provide. The men who ruled the planet could be proud of their work.

Yet the old statesman was uneasy. Perhaps the changes that lay ahead were already casting their shadows before them. Perhaps he felt, if only with his subconscious mind, that the five centuries of tranquillity were drawing to a close.

He switched on his writing machine and began to dictate.

The First Electronic Age, Peyton knew, had begun in 1908, more than eleven centuries before, with De Forest’s invention of the triode. The same fabulous century that had seen the coming of the World State, the airplane, the spaceship, and atomic power had witnessed the invention of all the fundamental thermionic devices that made possible the civilisation he knew.

The Second Electronic Age had come five hundred years later. It had been started not by the physicists but by the doctors and psychologists. For nearly five centuries they had been recording the electric currents that flow in the brain during the processes of thought. The analysis had been appallingly complex, but it had been completed after generations of toil. When it was finished the way lay open for the first machines that could read the human mind.

But this was only the beginning. Once man had discovered the mechanism of his own brain he could go further. He could reproduce it, using transistors and circuit networks instead of living cells.

Toward the end of the twenty-fifth century, the first thinking machines were built. They were very crude, a hundred square yards of equipment being required to do the work of a cubic centimetre of human brain. But once the first step had been taken it was not long before the mechanical brain was pefected and brought into general use.

It could perform only the lower grades of intellectual work and it lacked such purely human characteristics as initiative, intuition, and all emotions. However, in circumstances which seldom varied, where its limitations were not serious, it could do all that a man could do.

The coming of the metal brains had brought one of the great crises in human civilisation. Though men had still to carry out all the higher duties of statesmanship and the control of society, all the immense mass of routine administration had been taken over by the robots. Man had achieved freedom at last. No longer did he have to rack his brains planning complex transport schedules, deciding production programmes, and balancing budgets. The machines, which had taken over all manual labour centuries before, had made their second great contribution to society.

The effect on human affairs was immense, and men reacted to the new situation in two ways. There were those who used their new-found freedom nobly in the pursuits which had always attracted the highest minds: the quest for beauty and truth, still as elusive as when the Acropolis was built.

But there were others who thought differently. At last, they said, the curse of Adam is lifted forever. Now we can build cities where the machines will care for our every need as soon as the thought enters our minds – sooner, since the analysers can read even the buried desires of the subconscious. The aim of all life is pleasure and the pursuit of happiness. Man has earned the right to that. We are tired of this unending struggle for knowledge and the blind desire to bridge space to the stars.

It was the ancient dream of the Lotus Eaters, a dream as old as Man. Now, for the first time, it could be realised. For a while there were not many who shared it. The fires of the Second Renaissance had not yet begun to flicker and die. But as the years passed, the Decadents drew more and more to their way of thinking. In hidden places on the inner planets they built the cities of their dreams.

For a century they flourished like strange exotic flowers, until the almost religious fervour that inspired their building had died. They lingered for a generation more. Then, one by one, they faded from human knowledge. Dying, they left behind a host of fables and legends which had grown with the passing centuries.

Only one such city had been built on Earth, and there were mysteries about it that the outer world had never solved. For purposes of its own, the World Council had destroyed all knowledge of the place. Its location was a mystery. Some said it was in the Arctic wastes; others believed it to be hidden on the bed of the Pacific. Nothing was certain but its name – Comarre.

*

Henson paused in his recital.

‘So far I have told you nothing new, nothing that isn’t common knowledge. The rest of the story is a secret to the World Council and perhaps a hundred men of Scientia.

‘Rolf Thordarsen, as you know, was the greatest mechanical genius the world has ever known. Not even Edison can be compared with him. He laid the foundations of robot engineering and built the first of the practical thought-machines.

‘His laboratories poured out a stream of brilliant inventions for over twenty years. Then, suddenly, he disappeared. The story was put out that he tried to reach the stars. This is what really happened:

‘Thordarsen believed that his robots – the machines that still run our civilisation – were only a beginnning. He went to the World Council with certain proposals which would have changed the face of human society. What those changes are we do not know, but Thordarsen believed that unless they were adopted the race would eventually come to a dead end – as, indeed, many of us think it has.

‘The Council disagreed violently. At that time, you see, the robot was just being integrated into civilisation and stability was slowly returning – the stability that has been maintained for five hundred years.

‘Thordarsen was bitterly disappointed. With the flair they had for attracting genius the Decadents got hold of him and persuaded him to renounce the world. He was the only man who could convert their dreams into reality.’

‘And did he?’

‘No one knows. But Comarre was built – that is certain. We know where it is – and so does the World Council. There are some things that cannot be kept secret.’

That was true, thought Peyton. Even in this age people still disappeared and it was rumoured that they had gone in search of the dream city. Indeed, the phrase ‘He’s gone to Comarre’ had become such a part of the language that its meaning was almost forgotten.

Henson leaned forward and spoke with mounting earnestness.

‘This is the strange part. The World Council could destroy Comarre, but it won’t do so. The belief that Comarre exists has a definite stabilising influence on society. In spite of all our efforts, we still have psychopaths. It’s no difficult matter to give them hints, under hypnosis, about Comarre. They may never find it but the quest will keep them harmless.

‘In the early days, soon after the city was founded, the Council sent its agents into Comarre. None of them ever returned. There was no foul play; they just preferred to remain. That’s known definitely because they sent messages back. I suppose the Decadents realised that the Council would tear the place down if its agents were detained deliberately.

‘I’ve seen some of those messages. They are extraordinary. There’s only one word for them: exalted. Dick, there was something in Comarre that could make a man forget the outer world, his friends, his family – everything! Try to imagine what that means!

‘Later, when it was certain that none of the Decadents could still be alive, the Council tried again. It was still trying up to fifty years ago. But to this day no one has ever returned from Comarre.’

As Richard Peyton spoke, the waiting robot analysed his words into their phonetic groups, inserted the punctuation, and automatically routed the minute to the correct electronic files.

‘Copy to President and my personal file.

‘Your Minute of the 22nd and our conversation this morning.

‘I have seen my son, but R. P. III evaded me. He is completely determined, and we will only do harm by trying to coerce him. Thordarsen should have taught us that lesson.

‘My suggestion is that we earn his gratitude by giving him all the assistance he needs. Then we can direct him along safe lines of research. As long as he never discovers that R.T. was his ancestor, there should be no danger. In spite of character similarities, it is unlikely that he will try to repeat R.T.’s work.

‘Above all, we must ensure that he never locates or visits Comarre. If that happens, no one can foresee the consequences.’

Henson stopped his narrative, but his friend said nothing. He was too spellbound to interrupt, and, after a minute, the other continued.

‘That brings us up to the present and to you. The World Council, Dick, discovered your inheritance a month ago. We’re sorry we told them, but it’s too late now. Genetically, you’re a reincarnation of Thordarsen in the only scientific sense of the word. One of Nature’s longest odds has come off, as it does every few hundred years in some family or another.

‘You, Dick, could carry on the work Thordarsen was compelled to drop – whatever that work was. Perhaps it’s lost forever, but if any trace of it exists, the secret lies in Comarre. The World Council knows that. That is why it is trying to deflect you from your destiny.

‘Don’t be bitter about it. On the Council are some of the noblest minds the human race has yet produced. They mean you no harm, and none will ever befall you. But they are passionately anxious to preserve the present structure of society, which they believed to be the best.’

Slowly, Peyton rose to his feet. For a moment, it seemed as if he were a neutral, exterior observer, watching this lay figure called Richard Peyton III, now no longer a man, but a symbol, one of the keys to the future of the world. It took a positive mental effort to reidentify himself.

His friend was watching him silently.

‘There’s something else you haven’t told me, Alan. How do you know all this?’

Henson smiled.

‘I was waiting for that. I’m only the mouthpiece, chosen because I know you. Who the others are I can’t say, even to you. But they include quite a number of the scientists I know you admire.

‘There has always been a friendly rivalry between the Council and the scientists who serve it, but in the last few years our viewpoints have drifted farther apart. Many of us believe that the present age, which the Council thinks will last forever, is only an interregnum. We believe that too long a period of stability will cause decadence. The Council’s psychologists are confident they can prevent it.’