Imperial Earth

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

IMPERIAL EARTH

“Remember them as they were-, and write them off.”

-ERNEST HEMINGWAY

For every man has business and desire. -HAMLET, Act 1, Scene 4

Part I. Titan

A SHRIEK IN THE NIGHT

Duncan Makenzie was ten years old when he found the magic number. It was pure chance; he had intended to call Grandma Ellen, but he had been careless and his fingers must have touched the wrong keys. He knew at once that he had made a mistake, because Grandma’s viddy had a two-second delay, even on Auto/ Record This circuit was live immediately Yet there was no ringing tone, and no picture. The screen was completely blank, with not even a speckling of interference. Duncan guessed that he had been switched into an audio-only channel, or had reached a station where the camera was disconnected. In any case, this certainly wasn’t

Grandma’s number, and he reached out to break the circuit.

Then he noticed the sound. At first, he thought that someone was breathing quietly into the microphone at the far end, but he quickly realized his mistake. There was a random, inhuman quality about this gentle susurration; it lacked any regular rhythm, and there were long intervals of complete silence.

As he listened, Duncan felt a growing sense of awe. Here was something completely outside his normal, everyday experience, yet he recognized it almost at once. In his ten years of life, the impressions of many worlds had been in printed on his mind, and no one who had heard this most evocative of sounds could ever forget it. He was listening to the voice of the,~and, as it sighed and whispered across the lifeless landscape a hundred meters above his head.

Duncan forgot all about Grandma, and turned the volume up to its highest level. He lay back on the couch, closed his eyes, and tried to

project himself into the unknown, hostile world from which he was protected by all the safety devices that three hunared years of space technology could contrive.

Someday, when he had passed his survival tests, he would go up into that world and see with his own eyes the lakes and chasms and lowering orange clouds, lit by the thin, cold rays of the distant sun. He had looked forward to that day with calm anticipation rather than excitement-the Makenzies were noted for their lack of excitement-but now he suddenly realized what he was missing. So might a child of Earth, on some dusty desert far from the ocean, have pressed a shell against his ear and listened with sick longing to the music of the unattainable sea.

There was no mystery about the sound, but how was it reaching him? It could be coming from any of the hundred million square kilometers lying above his head. Somewhere-perhaps in an abandoned construction project or experimental stationa live microphone had been left in circuit, exposed to the freezing, poisonous winds of the world above. It was not likely to remain undetected for long; sooner or later it would be discovered and disconnected. He had better capture this message from the outside while it was still there; even if he knew the number he had accidentally called, he doubted if he could ever establish the circuit again.

The amount of audio-visual material that Duncan had stored under misc was remarkable, even for an inquisitive ten-year-old. It was not that he lacked organizing ability-that was the most celebrated of all the Makenzie talents-but he was interested in more things than he knew how to index. He had now begun to discover, the hard, way that information not properly classified can be irretrievably lost.

He thought intently for a minute, while the lonely wind sobbed and moaned and brought the chill of space into his warm little cubicle. Then he tapped out

APHA INDEX WIND SOUNDS PERM STORE #.

From the moment he touched the # or EXECUTE key, he had begun to capture that voice from the world above. If all went well, he could call it forth again at any time by using the index heading W1ND

SOUNDS. Even if he had made a mistake, and the console’s search program failed to locate the recording, it would be somewhere in the machine’s permanent, nonerasable memory. There was always the hope that he might one day find it again by chance, as was happening all the time with information he had filed under MISC.

He decided to let the recording run for another few minutes before completing the interrupted call to Grandma. As luck would have it, the wind must have slackened at about the time he keyed EXECUTE, because there was a long, frustrating silence. Then, out of that silence, came something new.

It was faint and distant, yet conveyed the impression of overwhelming power. First there was a thin scream that mounted second by second in intensity, but somehow never came any closer. The scream rose swiftly to a demonic shriek, with undertones of thunder then dwindled away as quickly as it had appeared. From beginning to end it lasted less than half a minute.