The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (25 page)

‘Who wants to go to the stars, anyway?’

The boy made an exclamation of annoyance and jumped off the diamond block in his excitement.

‘What a question to ask in this age! A thousand years ago people were saying, “Who wants to go to the Moon?” Yes, I know it’s unbelievable, but it’s all there in the old books. Nowadays the Moon’s only forty-five minutes away, and people like Harn Jansen work on Earth and live in Plato City.

‘We take interplanetary travel for granted. One day we’re going to do the same with
real
space travel. I could mention scores of other subjects that have come to a full stop simply because people think as you do and are content with what they’ve got.’

‘And why not?’

Peyton waved his arm around in the studio.

‘Be serious, Father. Have you ever been satisfied with anything you’ve made? Only animals are contented.’

The artist laughed ruefully.

‘Maybe you’re right. But that doesn’t affect my argument. I still think you’ll be wasting your life, and so does Grandfather.’ He looked a little embarrassed. ‘In fact, he’s coming down to Earth especially to see you.’

Peyton looked alarmed.

‘Listen, Father, I’ve already told you what I think. I don’t want to have to go through it all again. Because neither Grandfather nor the whole of the World Council will make me alter my mind.’

It was a bombastic statement, and Peyton wondered if he really meant it. His father was just about to reply when a low musical note vibrated through the studio. A second later a mechanical voice spoke from the air.

‘Your father to see you, Mr Peyton.’

He glanced at his son triumphantly.

‘I should have added,’ he said, ‘that Grandfather was coming now. But I know your habit of disappearing when you’re wanted.’

The boy did not answer. He watched his father walk toward the door. Then his lips curved in a smile.

The single pane of glassite that fronted the studio was open, and he stepped out on to the balcony. Two miles below, the great concrete apron of the parking ground gleamed whitely in the sun, except where it was dotted with the teardrop shadows of grounded ships.

Peyton glanced back into the room. It was still empty, though he could hear his father’s voice drifting through the door. He waited no longer. Placing his hand on the balustrade, he vaulted over into space.

Thirty seconds later two figures entered the studio and gazed around in surprise.
The
Richard Peyton, with no qualifying number, was a man who might have been taken for sixty, though that was less than a third of his actual age.

He was dressed in the purple robe worn by only twenty men on Earth and by fewer than a hundred in the entire Solar System. Authority seemed to radiate from him; by comparison, even his famous and self-assured son seemed fussy and inconsequential.

‘Well, where is he?’

‘Confound him! He’s gone out the window. At least we can still say what we think of him.’

Viciously, Richard Peyton II jerked up his wrist and dialled an eight-figure number on his personal communicator. The reply came almost instantly. In clear, impersonal tones an automatic voice repeated endlessly:

‘My master is asleep. Please do not disturb. My master is asleep. Please do not disturb….’

With an exclamation of annoyance Richard Peyton II switched off the instrument and turned to his father. The old man chuckled.

‘Well, he thinks fast. He’s beaten us there. We can’t get hold of him until he chooses to press the clearing button. I certainly don’t intend to chase him at my age.’

There was silence for a moment as the two men gazed at each other with mixed expression. Then, almost simultaneously, they began to laugh.

CHAPTER TWO

The Legend of Comarre

Peyton fell like a stone for a mile and a quarter before he switched on the neutraliser. The rush of air past him, though it made breathing difficult, was exhilarating. He was falling at less than a hundred and fifty miles an hour, but the impression of speed was enhanced by the smooth upward rush of the great building only a few yards away.

The gentle tug of the decelerator field slowed him some three hundred yards from the ground. He fell gently toward the lines of parked flyers ranged at the foot of the tower.

His own speedster was a small single-seat fully-automatic machine. At least, it had been fully automatic when it was built three centuries ago, but its current owner had made so many illegal modifications to it that no one else in the world could have flown it and lived to tell the tale.

Peyton switched off the neutraliser belt—an amusing device which, although technically obsolete, still had interesting possibilities—and stepped into the airlock of his machine. Two minutes later the towers of the city were sinking below the rim of the world and the uninhabited Wild Lands were speeding beneath at four thousand miles an hour.

Peyton set his course westward and almost immediately was over the ocean. He could do nothing but wait; the ship would reach its goal automatically. He leaned back in the pilot’s seat, thinking bitter thoughts and feeling sorry for himself.

He was more disturbed than he cared to admit. The fact that his family failed to share his technical interests had ceased to worry Peyton years ago. But this steadily growing opposition, which had now come to a head, was something quite new. He was completely unable to understand it.

Ten minutes later a single white pylon began to climb out of the ocean like the sword Excalibur rising from the lake. The city known to the world as Scientia, and to its more cynical inhabitants as Bat’s Belfry, had been built eight centuries ago on an island far from the major land masses. The gesture had been one of independence, for the last traces of nationalism had still lingered in that far-off age.

Peyton grounded his ship on the landing apron and walked to the nearest entrance. The boom of the great waves, breaking on the rocks a hundred yards away, was a sound that never failed to impress him.

He paused for a moment at the opening, inhaling the salt air and watching the gulls and migrant birds circling the tower. They had used this speck of land as a resting place when man was still watching the dawn with puzzled eyes and wondering if it was a god.

The Bureau of Genetics occupied a hundred floors near the centre of the tower. It had taken Peyton ten minutes to reach the City of Science. It required almost as long again to locate the man he wanted in the cubic miles of offices and laboratories.

Alan Henson II was still one of Peyton’s closest friends, although he had left the University of Antarctica two years earlier and had been studying biogenetics rather than engineering. When Peyton was in trouble, which was not infrequently, he found his friend’s calm common sense very reassuring. It was natural for him to fly to Scientia now, especially since Henson had sent him an urgent call only the day before.

The biologist was pleased and relieved to see Peyton, yet his welcome had an undercurrent of nervousness.

‘I’m glad you’ve come; I’ve got some news that will interest you. But you look glum—what’s the matter?’

Peyton told him, not without exaggeration. Henson was silent for a moment.

‘So they’ve started already!’ he said. ‘We might have expected it!’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Peyton in surprise.

The biologist opened a drawer and pulled out a sealed envelope. From it he extracted two plastic sheets in which were cut several hundred parallel slots of varying lengths. He handed one to his friend.

‘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 perfected 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.