Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

“You will understand that I have no option but to comply with this demand. Accordingly, I have ordered the sixth, twelfth, fourteenth, and eighteenth air forces to destroy the alien encampment.” He permitted himself a slight smile. “Under most circumstances that would be a highly classified decision, but I feel that showing the actual forces that have been brought to bear on the aggressors will help convince these alien invaders that they must immediately cease their provocative activities and declare their intention to depart Egyptian territory.”

The president turned to look at his own screen, just in time for the scene on the screens in the rest of the world to show the reality of what the president had promised. From all directions warplanes, arranged in precise flights and V s, were heading in toward a single target, the Qattara Depression. Ranjit recognized some of them—supersonic flying wings; immense old B-52s, originally deployed in the Vietnam War and still going strong; the tiny, fast stealth fighter-bombers—Ranjit counted at least a dozen different types of aircraft, all heading to the same point on the map—

And then, suddenly and without warning, they weren’t.

To Ranjit it looked like nothing as much as one of those radio dog fences, where the animal gets a shock from buried wiring any time he tries to pass a certain point in his run. The planes did the same thing. As they reached a certain point along the perimeter of a circle drawn with the Qattara Depression as its center, the orderly patterns of V s faltered, ceased to be coherent, one by one lost power. Nothing exploded. There were no flames, and no sign of enemy action. All that happened was that the mighty air fleet no longer displayed the torches of flame that were their jet exhausts. Those had winked out.

Lacking thrust, the planes did their best to glide to the ground, but their best was very poor. Within a matter of minutes the screens were displaying five or six hundred funeral pyres, each marking the point at which a member of the mighty striking force had hit the ground, the fuel that remained in its tanks immediately exploding.

And within the perimeter of the invaders’ camp, the various bits of busy machinery, paying no attention at all, kept right on with their arcane tasks.

For the One Point Fives themselves the Qattara Depression was pure heaven.

They particularly loved the brackish water of the oasis. It was purer than any water they had seen for generations on their own planet. Oh, sure, there were a few chemicals that had to be filtered out. But there were hardly any radioactive contaminants, and no positron emitters at all!

And the air! You could very nearly breathe it without a filter! True, it was on the warmish side—around 45°C, or perhaps 110°F, in the several confusing ways the human population had of measuring temperatures—but once they had finished digging their tunnel from the depression to the sea, there would be plenty of cooling Mediterranean waters to make the climate livable.

They were, in fact, about as happy as an enslaved race of largely prosthetic beings can be, except for one annoying thing.

As usual it was the Nine-Limbeds who were making trouble. The Nine-Limbeds had agreed to the destruction of the attacking aircraft because no actual local sentients’ lives were endangered, all of the war planes being of course remotely controlled. But, infuriatingly, the attack had destroyed some human life anyway.

A party of oil prospectors had had the bad luck to be setting up their seismometers just where one of the American bombers crashed. True, only eleven human beings had been killed, less than 0.0000001 percent of the human race. By any rational count that was hardly enough to worry about.

But the Nine-Limbeds kept caterwauling about it. Human ideas of justice and reparations were not the same as their own, as they knew from eavesdropping on every major human activity and a good many minor ones. Finally the council of the One Point Fives gave in. “What can we do to heal the situation?” they asked. “That is, other than leaving this extraordinarily inviting place to go back to our own planet, which we are not going to do.”

“Reparations,” said the experts of the Nine-Limbeds at once. “You must pay them. Through our eavesdropping program we have ascertained that nearly anything that goes wrong in the affairs of these human beings can be repaired by paying reparations, in the form of money. Would you be willing to do that?”

It didn’t take the One Point Fives long to answer that question. “Of course we will,” their leaders said at once. “What is ‘money’?”

A day later and quite a distance from Qattara, the Subramanian family was finishing breakfast. Natasha and Robert were already in their swimsuits, just waiting out the statutory, and mother-enforced, period of thirty minutes of delay after a meal before they could head for the beach. Ranjit, a cooling cup of tea in his hand, was frowning at the screen. What it showed was the bustling One Point Five colony as seen from one of the few still-human-controlled satellites, and Ranjit had been frowning at it for some time.

When Myra thought about it at all, she did wonder what her husband found so absorbing on the screen, though her mind was mostly on the morning’s assortment of incoming texts. She held one up for a better look and called to Ranjit. “Harvard wants to know if you’re interested in doing their commencement address again. Oh, and here’s one from Joris. He says they keep getting threatening messages, but if there actually are any satanists planning to really attack Skyhook, they’re not within twenty kilometers of the base. And—Wait! What’s that?”

What stopped Myra right there was a startled “Huh!” from her husband, and when she looked up, she saw why. The aerial view was gone, the satellite had been preempted again by the aliens for their own purposes, and a familiar figure was taking shape on the screen. Behind Myra her daughter snapped, “Oh, hell! It’s me again!”

It was. Or at least it was that indestructible not-Natasha, little curl hanging over her left ear, that had been displayed so frequently since the world had begun to fall apart. Myra sighed. “I do wish you’d had a little more clothes on,” she offered, and was spared her daughter’s withering reply as the figure began to speak.

“I am bringing you a message from the persons identified as the One Point Fives, currently located in what is called the Qattara Depression on the planet you call Earth. The message is as follows:

“‘We are deeply regretting loss of human life in defense against attack. We will pay reparations up to one thousand metric tons of ninety-nine and five nines pure metallic gold, but require ninety days for processing metal from seawater. Please inform that offer is accepted.’ This ends their message.”

The figure disappeared, the shiny structures of the colony popped up, and Ranjit turned around to gaze at his wife and children. He said incredulously, “I guess they’ve really made a sort of stock copy of Tashy they can use to make their announcements.”

Myra was diffidently smiling. “I don’t know, but did you hear what they said? It almost sounds good. If they’re willing to try to make up for what happened, there’s some hope.”

Ranjit nodded thoughtfully. “You know,” he said in wonder, “it’s been so long since there was any good news that I don’t know how to celebrate it. A drink all around?”

“It’s too early,” Natasha said at once. “Anyway, Robert doesn’t drink and neither do I, much. You people do what you want. He and I are going to the beach.”

“And I think I’ll call the office. I wonder what Davoodbhoy thinks about it,” Ranjit said, kissing his wife’s hand.