The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (15 page)

Then there came a faint trembling underfoot, and a curious disturbance at the centre of the lake. Like some evil thing emerging from the sea a great column of lava slowly climbed towards the stars, tottered and slowly fell. So sluggish was its motion that it never reached the ground but froze even as it fell to form a crooked finger jutting out of the plain. And that was the end of the
Eridanus
.

Jamieson broke the long silence at last. ‘Ready to start walking?’ he said.

Ten million miles away, the mortally wounded
Acheron
was limping back to Mars, bearing the shattered hopes of the Federation. On the second moon of Jupiter, white-faced men were sitting in conference and the destinies of the outer planets were passing from the hands of those who had planned the raid against the Moon.

Down on Earth the statesmen of the mother world faced reality at last. They had seen the Wilson drive in action and knew that the day of the rocket was gone. They also realised that although they had—at tremendous cost—won the first round the greater science of the Federation must prevail in the end. Peace and the Wilson drive were worth all the uranium in the universe. A message was already on its way to Mars with the news that Earth was willing to reopen negotiations.

It was well for humanity that the battle ended as it had. The
Acheron
would never fight again and no one could tell that any building made by man had ever stood in the Sea of Rains. Both sides had exhausted themselves.

Had Jamieson refused to continue his journey to the fortress complete victory might have gone to the Federation. Flushed with success, it might have been tempted to further adventures and the Treaty of Phoebus would never have been signed. Upon such small decisions may world destinies depend.

For hours, it seemed to Wheeler, they had been trudging across this seared and shattered plain, the brilliant Earthlight casting their shadows ahead of them. They spoke seldom, wishing to conserve the batteries of their suit radios. The curvature of the Moon made it impossible to signal the Observatory and there were still fifty miles to go.

It was not a pleasant prospect, for they had been able to salvage nothing from the tractor—it was now a pile of fused metal. But at least they could not lose their way with the Earth hanging fixed in the sky to guide them. They had only to keep walking into their shadows and in due course the Alps would come up over the horizon.

Wheeler was plodding along behind his friend, lost in his own thoughts, when Jamieson suddenly changed his direction of march. Slightly to the left a low ridge had appeared. When they reached it they found themselves climbing a hill not more than fifty feet high.

They looked eagerly to the north, but there was still no sign of the Alps. Jamieson switched on his radio.

‘They can’t be far below the horizon,’ he said. ‘I’m going to risk it.’

‘Risk what?’

‘Emergency transmission. You can key these sets for two minutes at fifty times normal power. Here goes.’

Very carefully, he broke the seal on the little control board inside the suit, and sent out the three dots, three dashes and three dots which were all that was left of the old Morse code.

Then they waited, staring toward the featureless skyline of the north. Below its edge, beyond sight and perhaps beyond signalling, lay safety. But the Observatory gave no sign.

Five minutes later Jamieson signalled again. This time he did not wait. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’d better start walking again.’ Wheeler followed glumly.

They were halfway down the slope when a golden flare climbed into the northern sky and erupted slowly against the stars. The sense of relief was so great that Wheeler was left weak.

He sat down clumsily on the nearest boulder and stared at that beautiful, heart-warming symbol hanging in the sky. Even now, he knew, the rescue tractors would be racing down the slope of the mountains.

He turned to his friend. ‘Well, Sid, that’s that, thank God.’

For a moment Jamieson did not reply. He too was staring up toward the stars—but along the path the retreating warship had followed hours before. ‘I wish I could be sure,’ he murmured half to himself, ‘that I did the right thing. They might have won…’

Then he turned toward the blinding disc of Earth, breathtakingly lovely beneath its belts of clouds. The future might belong to the Federation but almost all that it possessed it had inherited from the mother world. How could one choose between the two?

He shrugged his shoulders—there was nothing he could do about it now. Resolutely he turned toward the north and walked forward to receive the fame from which he would never escape.

Second Dawn

First published in
Science Fiction Quarterly
, August 1951

Collected in
Expedition to Earth

‘Here they come,’ said Eris, rising to his forefeet and turning to look down the long valley. For a moment the pain and bitterness had left his thoughts, so that even Jeryl, whose mind was more closely tuned to his than to any other, could scarcely detect it. There was even an undertone of softness that recalled poignantly the Eris she had known in the days before the War—the old Eris who now seemed almost as remote and as lost as if he were lying with all the others out there on the plain.

A dark tide was flowing up the valley, advancing with a curious, hesitant motion, making odd pauses and little bounds forward. It was flanked with gold—the thin line of the Atheleni guards, so terrifyingly few compared with the black mass of the prisoners. But they were enough: indeed, they were only needed to guide that aimless river on its faltering way. Yet at the sight of so many thousands of the enemy, Jeryl found herself trembling and instinctively moved towards her mate, silver pelt resting against gold. Eris gave no sign that he had understood or even noticed the action.

The fear vanished as Jeryl saw how slowly the dark flood was moving forwards. She had been told what to expect, but the reality was even worse than she had imagined. As the prisoners came nearer, all the hate and bitterness ebbed from her mind, to be replaced by a sick compassion. No one of her race need ever more fear the aimless, idiot horde that was being shepherded through the pass into the valley it would never leave again.

The guards were doing little more than urge the prisoners on with meaningless but encouraging cries, like nurses calling to infants too young to sense their thoughts. Strain as she might, Jeryl could detect no vestige of reason in any of these thousands of minds passing so near at hand. That brought home to her, more vividly than could anything else, the magnitude of the victory—and the defeat. Her mind was sensitive enough to detect the first faint thoughts of children, hovering on the verge of consciousness. The defeated enemy had become not even children, but babies with the bodies of adults.

The tide was passing within a few feet of them now. For the first time, Jeryl realised how much larger than her own people the Mithraneans were, and how beautifully the light of the twin suns gleamed on the dark satin of their bodies. Once a magnificent specimen, towering a full head above Eris, broke loose from the main body and came blundering towards them, halting a few paces away. Then it crouched down like a lost and frightened child, the splendid head moving uncertainly from side to side as if seeking it knew not what. For a moment the great, empty eyes fell full upon Jeryl’s face. She was as beautiful, she knew, to the Mithraneans as to her own race—but there was no flicker of emotion on the blank features, and no pause in the aimless movement of the questing head. Then an exasperated guard drove the prisoner back to his fellows.

‘Come away,’ Jeryl pleaded. ‘I don’t want to see any more. Why did you ever bring me here?’ The last thought was heavy with reproach.

Eris began to move away over the grassy slopes in great bounds that she could not hope to match, but as he went his mind threw its message back to hers. His thoughts were still gentle, though the pain beneath them was too deep to be concealed.

‘I wanted everyone—even you—to see what we had to do to win the War. Then, perhaps, we will have no more in our lifetimes.’

He was waiting for her on the brow of the hill, undistressed by the mad violence of his climb. The stream of prisoners was now too far below for them to see the details of its painful progress. Jeryl crouched down beside Eris and began to browse on the sparse vegetation that had been exiled from the fertile valley. She was slowly beginning to recover from the shock.

‘But what will happen to them?’ she asked presently, still haunted by the memory of that splendid mindless giant going into a captivity it could never understand.

‘They can be taught how to eat,’ said Eris. ‘There is food in the valley for half a year, and then we’ll move them on. It will be a heavy strain on our own resources, but we’re under a moral obligation—and we’ve put it in the peace treaty.’

‘They can never be cured?’

‘No. Their minds have been totally destroyed. They’ll be like this until they die.’

There was a long silence. Jeryl let her gaze wander across the hills, falling in gentle undulations to the edge of the ocean. She could just make out, beyond a gap in the hills, the distant line of blue that marked the sea—the mysterious, impassable sea. Its blue would soon be deepening into darkness, for the fierce white sun was setting and presently there would only be the red disc—hundreds of times larger but giving far less light—of its pale companion.

‘I suppose we had to do it,’ Jeryl said at last. She was thinking almost to herself, but she let enough of her thoughts escape for Eris to overhear.

‘You’ve seen them,’ he answered briefly. ‘They were bigger and stronger than we. Though we outnumbered them, it was stalemate: in the end, I think they would have won. By doing what we did, we saved thousands from death—or mutilation.’

The bitterness came back into his thoughts, and Jeryl dared not look at him. He had screened the depths of his mind, but she knew that he was thinking of the shattered ivory stump upon his forehead. The War had been fought, except at the very end, with two weapons only—the razor-sharp hooves of the little, almost useless forepaws, and the unicornlike horns. With one of these Eris could never fight again, and from the loss stemmed much of the embittered harshness that sometimes made him hurt even those who loved him.

Eris was waiting for someone, though who it was Jeryl could not guess. She knew better than to interrupt his thoughts while he was in his present mood, and so remained silently beside him, her shadow merging with his as it stretched far along the hill-top.

Jeryl and Eris came of a race which, in Nature’s lottery, had been luckier than most—and yet had missed one of the greatest prizes of all. They had powerful bodies and powerful minds, and they lived in a world which was both temperate and fertile. By human standards, they would have seemed strange but by no means repulsive. Their sleek, fur-covered bodies tapered to a single giant rear limb that could send them leaping over the ground in thirty-foot bounds. The two forelimbs were much smaller, and served merely for support and steadying. They ended in pointed hooves that could be deadly in combat, but had no other useful purpose.

Both the Atheleni and their cousins, the Mithraneans, possessed mental powers that had enabled them to develop a very advanced mathematics and philosophy; but over the physical world they had no control at all. Houses, tools, clothes—indeed, artifacts of any kind—were utterly unknown to them. To races which possessed hands, tentacles or other means of manipulation, their culture would have seemed incredibly limited: yet such is the adaptability of the mind, and the power of the commonplace, that they seldom realised their handicaps and could imagine no other way of life. It was natural to wander in great herds over the fertile plains, pausing where food was plentiful and moving on again when it was exhausted. This nomadic life had given them enough leisure for philosophy and even for certain arts. Their telepathic powers had not yet robbed them of their voices and they had developed a complex vocal music and an even more complex choreography. But they took the greatest pride of all in the range of their thoughts: for thousands of generations they had sent their minds roving through the misty infinities of metaphysics. Of
physics
, and indeed of all the sciences of matter, they knew nothing—not even that they existed.

‘Someone’s coming,’ said Jeryl suddenly. ‘Who is it?’

Eris did not bother to look, but there was a sense of strain in his reply.

‘It’s Aretenon. I agreed to meet him here.’

‘I’m so glad. You were such good friends once—it upset me when you quarrelled.’

Eris pawed fretfully at the turf, as he did when he was embarrassed or annoyed.

‘I lost my temper with him when he left me during the fifth battle of the Plain. Of course I didn’t know then why he had to go.’

Jeryl’s eyes widened in sudden amazement and understanding.

‘You mean—he had something to do with the Madness, and the way the War ended?’

‘Yes. There were very few people who knew more about the mind than he did. I don’t know what part he played, but it must have been an important one. I don’t suppose he’ll ever be able to tell us much about it.’

Still a considerable distance below them, Aretenon was zigzagging up the hillside in great leaps. A little later he had reached them and instinctively bent his head to touch horns with Eris in the universal gesture of greeting. Then he stopped, horribly embarrassed, and there was an awkward pause until Jeryl came to the rescue with some conventional remarks.

When Eris spoke, Jeryl was relieved to sense his obvious pleasure at meeting his friend once again, for the first time since their angry parting at the height of the War. It had been longer still since her last meeting with Aretenon, and she was surprised to see how much he had changed. He was considerably younger than Eris—but no one would have guessed it now. Some of his once-golden pelt was turning black with age, and with a flash of his old humour Eris remarked that soon no one would be able to tell him from a Mithranean.