Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (166 page)

‘Dr Hastings? Prickly little character. Very competent, but not easy to work with.’

‘What could he be trying to hide?’

‘Knowing you, I’m sure you have some interesting theories.’

‘Oh, I thought of narcotics, and fraud, and political conspiracies – but they don’t make sense, in these days. So what’s left scares the hell out of me.’

Chandra’s eyebrows signalled a silent question mark.

‘Interplanetary plague,’ said Cooper bluntly.

‘I thought that was impossible.’

‘Yes – I’ve written articles myself proving that the life forms on other planets have such alien chemistries that they can’t react with us, and that all our microbes and bugs took millions of years to adapt to our bodies. But I’ve always wondered if it was true. Suppose a ship has come back from Mars, say, with something
really
vicious – and the doctors can’t cope with it?’

There was a long silence. Then Chandra said: ‘I’ll start investigating.
I
don’t like it either, for here’s an item you probably don’t know. There were three nervous breakdowns in the Medical Division last month – and that’s very, very unusual.’

He glanced at his watch, then at the false sky, which seemed so distant, yet which was only two hundred feet above their heads.

‘We’d better get moving,’ he said. ‘The morning shower’s due in five minutes.’

The call came two weeks later, in the middle of the night – the real lunar night. By Plato City time, it was Sunday morning.

‘Henry? Chandra here. Can you meet me in half an hour at air lock five? Good – I’ll see you.’

This was it, Cooper knew. Air lock five meant that they were going outside the dome. Chandra had found something.

The presence of the police driver restricted conversation as the tractor moved away from the city along the road roughly bulldozed across the ash and pumice. Low in the south, Earth was almost full, casting a brilliant blue-green light over the infernal landscape. However hard one tried, Cooper told himself, it was difficult to make the Moon appear glamorous. But nature guards her greatest secrets well; to such places men must come to find them.

The multiple domes of the city dropped below the sharply curved horizon. Presently, the tractor turned aside from the main road to follow a scarcely visible trail. Ten minutes later, Cooper saw a single glittering hemisphere ahead of them, standing on an isolated ridge of rock. Another vehicle, bearing a red cross, was parked beside the entrance. It seemed that they were not the only visitors.

Nor were they unexpected. As they drew up to the dome, the flexible tube of the air-lock coupling groped out toward them and snapped into place against their tractor’s outer hull. There was a brief hissing as pressure equalised. Then Cooper followed Chandra into the building.

The air-lock operator led them along curving corridors and radial passageways toward the centre of the dome. Sometimes they caught glimpses of laboratories, scientific instruments, computers – all perfectly ordinary, and all deserted on this Sunday morning. They must have reached the heart of the building, Cooper told himself when their guide ushered them into a large circular chamber and shut the door softly behind them.

It was a small zoo. All around them were cages, tanks, jars containing a wide selection of the fauna and flora of Earth. Waiting at its centre was a short, grey-haired man, looking very worried, and very unhappy.

‘Dr Hastings,’ said Coomaraswamy, ‘meet Mr Cooper.’ The Inspector General turned to his companion and added, ‘I’ve convinced the Doctor that there’s only one way to keep you quiet – and that’s to tell you everything.’

‘Frankly,’ said Hastings, ‘I’m not sure if I give a damn any more.’ His voice was unsteady, barely under control, and Cooper thought, Hello! There’s another breakdown on the way.

The scientist wasted no time on such formalities as shaking hands. He walked to one of the cages, took out a small bundle of fur, and held it toward Cooper.

‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked abruptly.

‘Of course. A hamster – the commonest lab animal.’

‘Yes,’ said Hastings. ‘A perfectly ordinary golden hamster. Except that this one is five years old – like all the others in this cage.’

‘Well? What’s odd about that?’

‘Oh, nothing, nothing at all … except for the trifling fact that hamsters live for only two years. And we have some here that are getting on for ten.’

For a moment no one spoke; but the room was not silent. It was full of rustlings and slitherings and scratchings, of faint whimpers and tiny animal cries. Then Cooper whispered: ‘My God – you’ve found a way of prolonging life!’

‘No,’ retorted Hastings. ‘We’ve not found it. The Moon has given it to us … as we might have expected, if we’d looked in front of our noses.’

He seemed to have gained control over his emotions – as if he was once more the pure scientist, fascinated by a discovery for its own sake and heedless of its implications.

‘On Earth,’ he said, ‘we spend our whole lives fighting gravity. It wears down our muscles, pulls our stomachs out of shape. In seventy years, how many tons of blood does the heart lift through how many miles? And all that work, all that strain is reduced to a sixth here on the Moon, where a one-hundred-and-eighty-pound human weighs only thirty pounds.’

‘I see,’ said Cooper slowly. ‘Ten years for a hamster – and how long for a man?’

‘It’s not a simple law,’ answered Hastings. ‘It varies with the size and the species. Even a month ago, we weren’t certain. But now we’re quite sure of this: on the Moon, the span of human life will be at least two hundred years.’

‘And you’ve been trying to keep it secret!’

‘You fool! Don’t you understand?’

‘Take it easy, Doctor – take it easy,’ said Chandra softly.

With an obvious effort of will, Hastings got control of himself again. He began to speak with such icy calm that his words sank like freezing raindrops into Cooper’s mind.

‘Think of them up there,’ he said, pointing to the roof, to the invisible Earth, whose looming presence no one on the Moon could ever forget. ‘Six billion of them, packing all the continents to the edges – and now crowding over into the sea beds. And here –’ he pointed to the ground – ‘only a hundred thousand of
us
, on an almost empty world. But a world where we need miracles of technology and engineering merely to exist, where a man with an IQ of only a hundred and fifty can’t even get a job.

‘And now we find that we can live for two hundred years. Imagine how they’re going to react to
that
news! This is your problem now, Mister Journalist; you’ve asked for it, and you’ve got it. Tell me this, please – I’d really be interested to know –
just how are you going to break it to them?
’

He waited, and waited. Cooper opened his mouth, then closed it again, unable to think of anything to say.

In the far corner of the room, a baby monkey started to cry.

Dial F for Frankenstein

First published in
Playboy
, January 1965

Collected in
The Wind from the Sun

At 0150 GMT on December 1, 1975, every telephone in the world started to ring.

A quarter of a billion people picked up their receivers, to listen for a few seconds with annoyance or perplexity. Those who had been awakened in the middle of the night assumed that some far-off friend was calling, over the satellite telephone network that had gone into service, with such a blaze of publicity, the day before. But there was no voice on the line; only a sound, which to many seemed like the roaring of the sea; to others, like the vibrations of harp strings in the wind. And there were many more, in that moment, who recalled a secret sound of childhood – the noise of blood pulsing through the veins, heard when a shell is cupped over the ear. Whatever it was, it lasted no more than twenty seconds. Then it was replaced by the dial tone.

The world’s subscribers cursed, muttered ‘Wrong number’, and hung up. Some tried to dial a complaint but the line seemed busy. In a few hours, everyone had forgotten the incident – except those whose duty it was to worry about such things.

At the Post Office Research Station, the argument had been going on all morning, and had got nowhere. It continued unabated through the lunch break, when the hungry engineers poured into the little café across the road.

‘I still think,’ said Willy Smith, the solid-state electronics man, ‘that it was a temporary surge of current, caused when the satellite network was switched in.’

‘It was obviously
something
to do with the satellites,’ agreed Jules Reyner, circuit designer. ‘But why the time delay? They were plugged in at midnight; the ringing was two hours later – as we all know to our cost.’ He yawned violently.

‘What do
you
think, Doc?’ asked Bob Andrews, computer programmer. ‘You’ve been very quiet all morning. Surely you’ve got some idea?’

Dr John Williams, head of the Mathematics Division, stirred uneasily.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have. But you won’t take it seriously.’

‘That doesn’t matter. Even if it’s as crazy as those science-fiction yarns you write under a pseudonym, it may give us some leads.’

Williams blushed, but not much. Everyone knew about his stories, and he wasn’t ashamed of them. After all, they
had
been collected in book form. (Remaindered at five shillings; he still had a couple of hundred copies.)

‘Very well,’ he said, doodling on the tablecloth. ‘This is something I’ve been wondering about for years. Have you ever considered the analogy between an automatic telephone exchange and the human brain?’

‘Who hasn’t thought of it?’ scoffed one of his listeners. ‘That idea must go back to Graham Bell.’

‘Possibly. I never said it was original. But I do say it’s time we started taking it seriously.’ He squinted balefully at the fluorescent tubes above the table; they were needed on this foggy winter day. ‘What’s wrong with the damn lights? They’ve been flickering for the last five minutes.’

‘Don’t bother about that. Maisie’s probably forgotten to pay her electricity bill. Let’s hear more about your theory.’

‘Most of it isn’t theory; it’s plain fact. We know that the human brain is a system of switches – neurons – interconnected in a very elaborate fashion by nerves. An automatic telephone exchange is also a system of switches – selectors and so forth – connected with wires.’

‘Agreed,’ said Smith. ‘But that analogy won’t get you very far. Aren’t there about fifteen billion neurons in the brain? That’s a lot more than the number of switches in an autoexchange.’

Williams’ answer was interrupted by the scream of a lowflying jet. He had to wait until the café had ceased to vibrate before he could continue.

‘Never heard them fly
that
low,’ Andrews grumbled. ‘Thought it was against regulations.’

‘So it is, but don’t worry – London Airport Control will catch him.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Reyner. ‘That
was
London Airport, bringing in a Concorde on ground approach. But I’ve never heard one so low, either. Glad I wasn’t aboard.’

‘Are we, or are we
not
, going to get on with this blasted discussion?’ demanded Smith.

‘You’re right about the fifteen billion neurons in the human brain,’ continued Williams, unabashed. ‘And
that’s
the whole point. Fifteen billion sounds a large number, but it isn’t. Round about the 1960s, there were more than that number of individual switches in the world’s autoexchanges. Today, there are approximately five times as many.’

‘I see,’ said Reyner slowly. ‘And as from yesterday, they’ve all become capable of full interconnection, now that the satellite links have gone into service.’

‘Precisely.’

There was silence for a moment, apart from the distant clanging of a fire-engine bell.

‘Let me get this straight,’ said Smith. ‘Are you suggesting that the world telephone system is now a giant brain?’

‘That’s putting it crudely – anthropomorphically. I prefer to think of it in terms of critical size.’ Williams held his hands out in front of him, fingers partly closed.

‘Here are two lumps of U-235. Nothing happens as long as you keep them apart. But bring them together’ – he suited the action to the words – ‘and you have something
very
different from one bigger lump of uranium. You have a hole half a mile across.

‘It’s the same with our telephone networks. Until today, they’ve been largely independent, autonomous. But now we’ve suddenly multiplied the connecting links, the networks have all merged together, and we’ve reached criticality.’

‘And just what does criticality mean in this case?’ asked Smith.

‘For want of a better word – consciousness.’