Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

Natasha spoke up at once. “That never happened, Mr. Bledsoe. I don’t remember anything at all of being a captive.”

Her father raised one hand. “He knows it’s a lie, hon,” he told her. “All right, Bledsoe. Why do you want to whip up the hatred for these creatures?”

“Because sooner or later we’re going to have to wipe them out. What else? Oh, we’ll let them land, all right. But then you go on the air, Subramanian, to say your daughter has confided things in you that you think the world needs to know, and then Natasha comes on and tells her story.”

He was looking actually pleased about the prospect, Ranjit thought. “And then what?” he demanded.

Bledsoe shrugged. “We wipe ’em out,” he said. “Hit them first with a Silent Thunder so they can’t do anything about it. Then we turn the entire American air force on them with every bomb and rocket they can carry, and all the ICBMs, too. Nuclear and all. I guarantee there won’t be anything bigger than the tip of your little finger left when we’re through.”

Myra snorted, but it was Ranjit who spoke. “Bledsoe,” he said, “you’re crazy. Do you think these people don’t have their own weapons? All you’re going to do is get a few thousand air crew killed—and make the aliens mad.”

“Wrong twice,” Bledsoe said scornfully. “Every one of those American planes is fly-by-wire, with all the crews safely on the ground. And it doesn’t matter if those things get mad. We’ve got a saying in the States, Subramanian. ‘Live free or die.’ Or don’t you believe in that?”

Myra opened her mouth to answer for all of them, but Ranjit forestalled her. “What I don’t believe in,” he said, “is telling lies that are going to get people killed, even if they aren’t human people. We aren’t going to do what you want, Bledsoe. What I think we ought to do is get on the screens, all right, but what we ought to do is tell the world what you proposed.”

Bledsoe gave him a poisonous look. “You think that would make any difference? Hell, Subramanian, do you know what ‘deniable’ means? I’m deniable. If this gets out, the president just shakes his head and says, ‘Poor old Colonel Bledsoe. He was doing what he thought was right, but completely on his own initiative. I never authorized any such plan.’ And maybe some reporters pester me for a while, but I just don’t talk to them and pretty soon it all blows over. As leader of the predominant force on this planet, it’s the president’s duty to defend the weaker states, and he has determined that to attack is the best course to follow. I serve at the pleasure of the president. What do you say to that?”

Ranjit stood up. “I want to live free, all right, but that isn’t on offer here, is it? If the choice is between living in a world where people like you are in charge and one run by scaly green monsters from space, why, I just might pick the monsters. And now get out of my house!”

When at last the One Point Five fleet came down to the surface of Earth, they were accompanied by an enormous fireworks show. That pyrotechnical display did not come about for the same reasons a returning human fleet of spacecraft might produce such a display, though. All those old human-built Mercury capsules and Soyuzes and space shuttles struck Earth’s air in an eye-straining blaze of fire when they came home, and the reason was simple. They had no choice about it. They had to slow down for reentry, and nothing but friction with the atmosphere could brake their descent enough to allow safe landing on the ground.

The spacecraft of the One Point Fives, on the other hand, had no need for air friction. Their descent was slowed by a completely different mechanism. They simply fired their ionic rockets in a forward direction, at full power, to serve as brakes. It was a gentler way to land, and one that offered more accurate control on a landing site.

It also required immensely more energy, but conserving energy was not a priority for the One Point Fives.

A problem for human observers was figuring out just where the armada had chosen to set down. An early guess was somewhere in the Libyan desert, perhaps on the beaches along the Mediterranean. That was quickly revised to somewhere a bit farther east and north, perhaps somewhere in the otherwise empty northwestern desert provinces of Egypt.

It didn’t take the news channels’ experts long to come up with the name “Qattara Depression.”

Then it took Myra and Ranjit less time than that to get their search engines going. “This Qattara thing is the world’s fifth deepest depression,” Myra called, reading from her screen. “It goes down as low as 133 meters below sea level.”

“And it’s only fifty-six kilometers from the sea,” Ranjit added, eyes on his own screen. “And—wait a minute!—in some ways it’s the world’s biggest depression of the Earth’s surface there is on land, with more than forty thousand square kilometers that are below sea level.” And it was uninhabited, they both learned at once, except for wandering bedouin tribes and their flocks, and of no apparent value to anyone—at least not to any human. The only thing about it that seemed ever to have mattered to human beings was that at least for a few weeks it had been really important in one of those twentieth-century wars, the one between the Germans and the English. Then the impassable Qattara Depression had trapped the Germans where the English could inflict heavy losses on them in what was called the Battle of El Alamein.

At that point Myra and Ranjit gave up the search as unproductive. “I don’t think that’s why these aliens picked it,” Ranjit said at last. “Because it’s easy to defend against an army, I mean.”

“But what, then?” Myra asked.

For that Ranjit frowned but did not answer. They spent the next quarter of an hour inventing increasingly unlikely motives, until the news screen broke in. What the reporter had to tell them was that the first official bluster had just come in from Cairo. Its tone was belligerent.

Well, that’s not quite giving the true picture. The broadcast came from Cairo, all right, but it wasn’t delivered by an Egyptian. The speaker was the American ambassador. The Egyptian government, he informed the world, had asked him to give the official reply for them. That area called Munkhafad al-Qattar-ah, he said, was an integral part of the sovereign state of the Arab Republic of Egypt. The intruders had no right to be there. They were commanded to leave Egyptian territory at once or face the consequences.

It was obvious that secret meetings had been going on, and the ambassador’s next words left no doubt of what they had been about. “The Arab Republic of Egypt,” he proclaimed, “is one of America’s oldest and closest allies. Trespassers will have to face Egypt’s military might as well as that of the United States.”

“Oh my God,” Ranjit murmured. “I smell T. Orion Bledsoe again.”

“And heaven help us now,” said the irreligious Myra to her even less religious husband.

It might have eased the situation if the alien beings landing on Earth had taken time to announce what their long-range plans actually were. No explanation was offered. Perhaps the aliens couldn’t handle more than one thing at a time—or thought that these primitive Earth humans couldn’t—because what they did do, incessantly, was keep their promise to show humanity, all over again, every last one of the galaxy’s assorted races of beings.

This had been quite interesting at one time. That time, however, was past. About the only viewers who stayed tuned in were producers of low-budget horror films, eagerly seeking ideas to pass on to their makeup departments, plus what remained of the world’s dwindling corps of taxonomists, each of whom had been intoxicated by a sudden breathtaking vision of becoming the Carolus Linnaeus (subclass Alien Biota) of the twenty-first century.