Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (5 page)

‘Gentlemen,’ said the President of the Council gravely, ‘I am sorry to say that we have received a severe setback in our plans to colonize the third planet. As you all know, we have for many years been working on that planet unknown to its inhabitants, preparing for the day when we should take over complete control. We anticipated no resistance, for the people of Three are at a very primitive level of development, and possess no weapons which could harm us. Moreover, they are continually quarrelling among themselves owing to the extraordinary number of political groups or “nations” into which they are divided, a lack of unity which will no doubt be a considerable help to our plans.

‘To obtain the fullest possible knowledge of the planet and its peoples, we have had several hundred investigators working on Three, a number in each important city. Our men have done very well, and thanks to their regular reports we now have a detailed knowledge of this strange world. In fact, until a few setas ago I would have said that we knew everything of importance concerning it, but now I find that we were very much mistaken.

‘Our chief investigator in the country known as England, which has been mentioned here on a number of occasions, was that very intelligent young student, Cervac Theton, grandson of the great Vorac. He progressed splendidly with the English, a particularly guileless race it seems, and was soon accepted into their highest society. He even spent some time at one of their great seats of learning (so called) but soon left in disgust. Though it had nothing to do with his real purpose, this energetic young man also studied the wild animals of Three, for remarkable though it seems there are a great many strange and interesting creatures roaming freely over large areas of the planet. Some are actually dangerous to man, but he has conquered most of them and even exterminated some species. It was while studying these beasts that Cervac made the discovery which I fear may change our whole plan of action. But let Cervac speak for himself.’

The President threw a switch, and from concealed speakers Cervac Theton’s voice rang out over that assembly of the greatest brains of Mars.

‘– come to what is the most important part of this communication. For some time I have been studying the many wild creatures of this planet, purely for the sake of scientific knowledge. The animals of Three are divided into four main groups – mammals, fishes, reptiles and insects, and a number of lesser groups. There have been many representatives of the first three classes on our own planet, though of course there are none now, but as far as I know there have never been insects on our world at any time in its history. Consequently they attracted my attention from the first, and I made a careful study of their habits and structure.

‘You who have never seen them will have great difficulty in imagining what these creatures are like. There are millions of different types, and it would take ages to classify all of them, but they are mostly small animals with many jointed limbs and with a hard armoured body. They are usually very small, about half a zem in length, and are often winged. Most of them lay eggs and undergo a number of metamorphoses before they become perfect creatures. I am sending with this report a number of photographs and films which will give you a better idea of their infinite variety than any words of mine. I obtained most of my information on the subject from the literature which has been built up by thousands of patient students who have devoted their lives to watching insects at work. The inhabitants of Three have taken much interest in the creatures which share their world, and this, I think, is another proof that they are more intelligent than some of our scientists would have us believe.’

At this there were smiles in the audience, for the House of Theton had always been noted for its radical and unorthodox views.

‘In my studies I came across accounts of some extraordinary creatures which live in the tropical regions of the planet. They are called “termites” or “white ants” and live in large, wonderfully organised communities. They even have cities – huge mounds, honey-combed with passages and made of exceedingly hard materials. They can perform prodigious feats of engineering, being able to bore through metals and glass, and they can destroy most of man’s creations when they wish. They eat cellulose, that is, wood, and since man uses this material extensively he is always waging war on these destroyers of his possessions. Perhaps luckily for him, the termites have even deadlier enemies, the ants, which are a very similar type of creature. These two races have been at war for geological ages, and the outcome is still undecided.

‘Although they are blind, the termites cannot endure light and so even when they venture from their cities they always keep under cover, making tunnels and cement tubes if they have to cross open country. They are wonderful engineers and architects and no ordinary obstacle will deflect them from their purpose. Their most remarkable achievement, however, is a biological one. From the same eggs they can produce half a dozen different types of specialised creature. Thus they can breed fighters with immense claws, soldiers which can spray poison over their opponents, workers which act as food stores by virtue of their immense distended stomachs and a number of other fantastic mutations. You will find a full account of them, as far as they are known to the naturalists of Three, in the books I am sending.

‘The more I read of their achievements, the more I was impressed by the perfection of their social system. It ocurred to me, as indeed it had to many previous students, that a termitary may be compared to a vast machine, whose component parts are not of metal but of protoplasm, whose wheels and cogs are separate insects, each with some preordained role to perform. It was not until later that I found how near the truth this analogy was.

‘Nowhere in the termitary is there any waste or disorder, and everywhere there is mystery. As I considered the matter it seemed to me that the termites were much more worthy of our attention, from the purely scientific point of view, than man himself. After all, man is not so very different from ourselves, though I shall annoy many by saying so, yet these insects are utterly alien to us in every way. They work, live and die for the good of the state. To them the individual is nothing. With us, and with man, the state exists only for the individual. Who shall say which is right?

‘These problems so engrossed me that I eventually decided to study the little creatures myself with all the instruments at my command, instruments of which the naturalists of Three had never dreamt. So I selected a small uninhabited island in a lonely part of the Pacific, the greatest ocean of Three, where the strange mounds of the termites clustered thickly, and constructed on it a little metal building to serve as a laboratory. As I was thoroughly impressed by the creatures’ destructive powers, I cut a wide circular moat round the building, leaving enough room for my ship to land, and let the sea flow in. I thought that ten zets of water would keep them from doing any mischief. How foolish that moat looks now.

‘These preparations took several weeks for it was not very often that I was able to leave England. In my little space-yacht the journey from London to Termite Island took under half a sector so little time was lost in this way. The laboratory was equipped with everything I considered might be useful and many things for which I could see no conceivable use, but which might possibly be required. The most important instrument was a high-powered gamma-ray televisor which I hoped would reveal to me all the secrets hidden from ordinary sight by the walls of the termitary. Perhaps equally useful was a very sensitive psychometer, of the kind we use when exploring planets on which new types of mentalities may exist, and which we might not detect in the ordinary way. The device could operate on any conceivable mind frequency, and at its highest amplification could locate a man several hundred miles away. I was certain that even if the termites possessed only the faintest glimmers of an utterly alien intelligence, I would be able to detect their mental processes.

‘At first I made relatively little progress. With the televisor I examined all the nearest termitaries, and fascinating work it was following the workers along the passages of their homes as they carried food and building materials hither and thither. I watched the enormous bloated queen in the royal nursery, laying her endless stream of eggs: one every few seconds, night and day, year after year. Although she was the centre of the colony’s activities, yet when I focused the psychometer on her the needles did not so much as flicker. The very cells of my body could do better than that! The monstrous queen was only a brainless mechanism, none the less mechanical because she was made of protoplasm, and the workers looked after her with the care we would devote to one of our useful robots.

‘For a number of reasons I had not expected the queen to be the ruling force of the colony, but when I began to explore with psychometer and televisor, nowhere could I discover any creature, any super-termite, which directed and supervised the operations of the rest. This would not have surprised the scientists of Three, for they hold that the termites are governed by instinct alone. But my instrument could have detected the nervous stimuli which constitute automatic reflex actions, and yet I found nothing. I would turn up the amplification to its utmost, put on a pair of those primitive but very useful “head-phones” and listen hour on hour. Sometimes there would be those faint characteristic cracklings we have never been able to explain, but generally the only sound was the subdued washing noise, like waves breaking on some far-off beach, caused by the massed intellects of the planet reacting on my apparatus.

‘I was beginning to get discouraged when there occurred one of those accidents which happen so often in science. I was dismantling the instrument after another fruitless investigation when I happened to knock the little receiving loop so that it pointed to the ground. To my surprise the needles started flickering violently. By swinging the loop in the usual way I discovered that the exciting source lay almost directly underneath me, though at what distance I could not guess. In the phones was a continuous humming noise, interspersed with sudden flickerings. It sounded for all the world like any electric machine operating, and the frequency, one hundred thousand mega mega cycles, was not one on which minds have ever been known to function before. To my intense annoyance, as you can guess, I had to return to England at once, and so I could not do anything more at the time.

‘It was a fortnight before I could return to Termite Island, and in that time I had to overhaul my little space-yacht owing to an electrical fault. At some time in her history, which I know to have been an eventful one, she had been fitted with ray screens. They were, moreover, very good ray screens, much too good for a law-abiding ship to possess. I have every reason to believe, in fact, that more than once they have defied the cruisers of the Assembly. I did not much relish the task of checking over the complex automatic relay circuits, but at last it was done and I set off at top speed for the Pacific, travelling so fast that my bow wave must have been one continuous explosion. Unfortunately, I soon had to slow down again, for I found that the directional beam I had installed on the island was no longer functioning. I presumed that a fuse had blown, and had to take observations and navigate in the ordinary way. The accident was annoying but not alarming, and I finally spiralled down over Termite Island with no premonition of danger.

‘I landed inside my little moat, and went to the door of the laboratory. As I spoke the key-word, the metal seal slid open and a tremendous blast of vapour gushed out of the room. I was nearly stupefied by the stuff, and it was some time before I recovered sufficiently to realise what had happened. When I regained my senses I recognised the smell of hydrogen cyanide, a gas which is instantly fatal to human beings but which only affects us after a considerable time.

‘At first I thought that there had been some accident in the laboratory, but I soon remembered that there were not enough chemicals to produce anything like the volume of gas that had gushed out. And in any case, what could possibly have produced such an accident?

‘When I turned to the laboratory itself, I had my second shock. One glance was sufficient to show that the place was in ruins. Not a piece of apparatus was recognisable. The cause of the damage was soon apparent – the power plant, my little atomic motor, had exploded. But why? Atomic motors do not explode without very good reason; it would be bad business if they did. I made a careful examination of the room and presently found a number of little holes coming up through the floor – holes such as the termites make when they travel from place to place. My suspicions, incredible though they were, began to be confirmed. It was not completely impossible that the creatures might flood my room with poisonous gas, but to imagine that they understood atomic motors – that was too much! To settle the matter I started hunting for the fragments of the generator, and to my consternation found that the synchronising coils had been short-circuited. Still clinging to the shattered remnants of the osmium toroid were the jaws of the termite that had been sacrificed to wreck the motor …

‘For a long time I sat in the ship, considering these outstanding facts. Obviously, the damage had been wrought by the intelligence I had located for a moment on my last visit. If it were the termite ruler, and there was nothing else it could very well be, how did it come to possess its knowledge of atomic motors and the only way in which to wreck them? For some reason, possibly because I was prying too deeply into its secrets, it had decided to destroy me and my works. Its first attempt had been unsuccessful, but it might try again with better results, though I did not imagine that it could harm me inside the stout walls of my yacht.